Matteo Gonet

Matteo Gonet was born in 1979; he started working with glass at age 14.
Starting off as a torch welder in Germany, he then explored Europe from workshop to workshop for five journeyman years. In 1980, he obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and found employment with the International Center of Research on Glass and Visual Arts (CIRVA) in Marseilles, working as a glass blower for the likes of Philippe Parreno, Ettore Sottsass, Andrea Branzi, the Bouroullec brothers. He also met Jean-Michel Othoniel with whom he now still collaborates. Driven by his passion for glass, he is a sensitive and demanding craftsman whose work is now widely recognised.
His Basel workshop, which opened in 2008, is uniquely versatile: it has the ability to produce blown, cast, thermoformed, cut, sanded, faceted or frosted glass... no technique seems beyond his reach, and he will never let his own personality stand in the way of a project. The workshop is a forum for experimentation and production, with a team of a dozen or so employees from all over Europe.