Lorenzo Malfatti was born in 1959 in Viareggio, Tuscany. After high school he begins to train within the artistic glass manufacturing field. In mid 80s he gives life to the MALò studio, he focuses on the research of glass melting, creating very important artworks for churches and palaces around the world. From 2000 to 2005 he is the art director of the VALDERAVETRO glassware, where he improves and refine his glass melting technique, including pigments and metal shards. In the same period begins his collaboration with Danile Lucchetta’s gallery in Venice and with a kiln in Murano, following with two personal exhibition and various collective shows. In 2007, he presents his solo show “Riflessioni” in Pietrasanta, this is a media path where light, matters and sound interact with each other in this very suggestive exhibition, with big canvas, glass , video projection and music. During those years he creates totems with glass ad lights, monoliths made by hundreds sheets of glass with video projections passing through and light up with led lights. As for paintings, he continues to work with glass encrusted in his canvas, in wood supports or sew-on linen sheets. In 2008, in Florence, he presents the exhibition “Arazzi” where he revisits, with a contemporary point of view, the theme of tapestries.

During the Autumn of 2008, in occasion of 150th anniversary of the birth of Giacomo Puccini, he is invited to set up an exhibition in Brussels at the Italian Institute of Culture. During the same year he participates in a collective exhibition about abstraction from post-war to the present day, implemented by Viareggio Cultural Department in the pinacoteca Palazzo Paolina. In February 2009, the city of Lucca presents a retrospective exhibition about him, in Villa Guingi di Mataraia. In 2009 and 2010 he is invited by the Scuola Normale of Pisa and the NEST Center (National Enterprise for Science and nano technology) to develop of a project on the refraction of light within the glass, aimed at the synergy between Art and Science. One of his installations, "Cascata di Luce", made of wood, glass and light, was published in the catalog "Gli Stati dell'Arte in Italia", the review regrouping all the regional pavilions of the fifty-fourth Venice Biennale. In 2015, he realizes, on behalf of the naval architecture firm Luca Dini, an installation on board the 60 meter yach "SARASTAR". Entitled "Tecnototem", it is made of 1200 sheets of glass, each one carved by hand by the artist and superimposed, forming an eight meter high wall. And three meters wide with inside 700 Led that create the intended games of light refraction.

Malfatti writes about his work:

MATTER, LIGHT, SOUND, SILENCE

"All my artistic research can be considered as long journey into LIGHT, to capture it, manipulate it and return it to the ARTWORK. Through the meticulous study of every smallest glare, reverberation and shadows that may derive from them, I transmit energy and dynamism to my creations, but above all I try to open gaps, passages to penetrate the material, in search of a primordial tension.

This is why I chose glass as an original material that characterizes my pictorial and sculptural artworks. Transparencies and reflections have become my palette: an infinity of uncontrollable but predictable chromatic scale, a crystallized fluid, pulsating with energy, that captures the light and returns it, fragmented, into endless stories to be reinvented; I have never tried to describe the visible, I have only tried to evoke the invisible, that hidden part that resides in the deepest recesses of our soul. There is a door, a key to my work that can transport those who observe it within an immaterial dimension; the glass constitutes the permeable area through which one traverses beyond the outer dimension to cross the frontier of the dimension of the immediate appearance and enter into the evocative one of memory, where each one finds his own key of perception and interpretation of the emotion. This area is a sacred place for me, it is the starting point of a spiritual journey that has neither time nor space, an ancestral chromosome belonging to the human race that overcomes cultural, racial or religious barriers and leads us back to an essential relationship between our material dimension and the deeper dimension of the Soul. I believe this is, after all, the profound meaning of art. “