Returns – Glass
An apparently fragile material, glass delights us with its transparency and brilliance, but above all with its ability to reflect light. Mirroring immediate reality, it creates the illusion that we can penetrate its depths.
Thanks to its specific properties, glass has been part of our life for centuries, being used in various fields of activity – in traditional crafts, in industry, in pharmacy and medicine, in architecture, in fine arts and in the restoration of cultural assets. That is why the United Nations has declared 2022 the International Year of Glass. In this context, the National Museum of the "Dimitrie Gusti" Village organizes an exhibition under the titleReturns – Glass,through which it aims to illustrate the use of glass in an ethnographic context, with an emphasis on its use as an element that ennobles the pieces of popular wear and the ornaments worn by women and men at celebrations.
The exhibition is an invitation to an incursion into the universe of glass, starting from the bead as simple as a dewdrop, passing through the fascinating mirrors and lingering longer in front of the icons with divine sparks, reminiscent of the uncreated Light.
The exhibition includes over two hundred cultural assets preserved and restored by the specialists of the museum's Profile Laboratory, representing: icons painted on glass, votives, chromolithographs in a box with protective glass, woodcuts; liturgical vessels - candles, glass for aghiasma, crosses; women's and men's folk costumes; carpets, wiping; popular carved and painted wooden furniture – dowry chests, spinning forks, mirrors; ceramics used in interior design and wedding jugs; lighting systems – gas lamps; time measuring systems – wall clocks with pendulum and pictorial layer, originating from the Black Forest Mountains region, Germany (wall clock with pendulum and cuckoo, wall clock with pendulum and dial painted on glass). Alongside these are present images from the museum archive preserved by modern methods – photographs and sociological documentary film sequences made during the research undertaken by the teams coordinated by professor Dimitrie Gusti in the interwar period.
The objects from the port, textile, religious, metal and wood collections are grouped around three cores: the first two cores comprise the wedding and the iconographer's workshop; in the third core, sequences from the activity of the Heritage Conservation and Restoration Laboratory are presented, in specialized documentation and in images illustrating work methods and stages.
Therefore, glass - matter present in most fields of activity, has the ability to beautify and enrich our lives, although it apparently goes unnoticed.
exhibitionReturns-Glassis yet another proof of the concerns of the specialists from the National Village Museum regarding the research, conservation, restoration and valorization of the cultural heritage in the collections.
The exhibition can be visited starting from November 2, 2022, in the "Donor Hall" of the National Museum of the "Dimitrie Gusti" Village in 30 Kiseleff Street, from Wednesday to Sunday, between 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m.
