contessanally: Venice - San Giorgio Maggiore - Le Stanze del Vetro - Bohemian Glass: The Great Masters

Le Stanze del Vetro

Bohemian Glass: The Great Masters

Exhibition and Party Photos

At Le Stanze del Vetro on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore the exhibition - Bohemian Glass: The Great Masters - curated by Caterina Tognon and Sylva Petrova - until November 26 - is organized in collaboration with the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague and recounts the emancipation of Bohemian glass from its traditional categorization as applied and decorative art, as well as its use in the creation of influential abstract sculptural works in Bohemia after the Second World War.

Vaclav Cigler - Square with Spiral - 1970s

Curators Caterina Tognon and Sylva Petrova with David Landau

The exhibition features the works of six leading major artists of contemporary glass sculpture, leading figures in the Czech glassmaking scene who lived through turbulent societal upheavals because they had been born in the Czech lands in the 1920s and 1930s. These artists endured the largest-ever military conflict in Europe, followed by a brief respite of freedom and democracy, only to be plunged into totalitarian domination in 1948, which they could finally shed to return to standards of European democracy after 1989. It is remarkable that, despite all the negative effects caused by the absence of freedom and prosperity, they managed to overcome these challenges and grow their art in the broader context of the development of certain artistic disciplines in erstwhile Czechoslovakia. These were artists who initiated and nurtured a relatively “new” mode of glassmaking, “artistic glass” which was not intended for mass production. The works they created were unique, as in the case of traditional artistic disciplines such as sculpting or painting, while drawing on the specific characteristics of glass.

Vaclav Cigler with Michal Motycka - Golden Raft - 2007

Vaclav Cigler - Sphere - Rainbow Egg - 2019

Luca Massimo Barbero, Marie-Rose Kahane, Giorgio Vigna and Giorgio Mastinu

"Glass is the material of light...An exclusive and irreplaceable material... Glass is equally material as it is immaterial, equally real as it is unreal, equally distinct as it is self-transcending, questioning the experience of our senses. Glass is a material both programmed and with a life of its own."

Vaclav Cigler

Bench - 2001 - Spring - 1992

Marino Barovier and Renata Codello

The exhibition presents the late-1960s designs of visionary installations and architecture and, even more, sophisticated optic crystal artworks of great impact in terms of purity and minimalism of Vaclav Cigler - Vsetiin 1929.

Vaclav Cigler - Blue Pyramid - 2020

Alessandra and Alessandro Zoppi with Alvise Orsini

Vaclav Cigler - Drawings - Relations - Architecture - 1995-1999

Stefano Baccari and Cristina Beltrami

"Water stopped, to please the human eye. The substance is crystal clear and has become synonymous with purity."

Rene Roubicek - Prague 1922-2018 - Miluse Roubickova - Prague 1922-2015 - whose work is also on show - are two artists who were a couple in their private life, yet independent in their artistic output. Roubicek’s - above - abstract glass pieces are an expression of vitality and serenity, but at the same time they portray the contemporary creative way with which the artist faced a painful and difficult life during the years of the Communist regime.

Promenade - Pinacotheca Series - 2003

Rosita Missoni and Angela Missoni

Rene Roubicek - Heads - 1977

Photo Enrico Fiorese - Private collection - Venice - Multicolor hand-blown glass

Courtesy Le Stanze del vetro

Rene Roubicek - Little Cosmos - 1960s

Rene Roubicek - Columns -1964-1967 - Untitled - 1990s

Michael Craig-Martin

Maria Grazia Rosin

Gianluigi Calderone and Paolo Diaz de Santillana

"The values of existence largely consists in how fervently we are able to live them. The value of our human life is dependent on the values within us. People create their own human world. It holds that which we put in it."

A characteristic narrative trait of Miluse Roubickova’s production is a representation of the female world that is far ahead of its time: through bouquets of flowers, trays of pastries, balls of coloured wool and jam jars, all rigorously made of glass, she represents all the women and their specific domestic world.

Miluse Roubickova - Blossoms - Blue -1991 - Amber - 1970s

Yellow and Red Bouquet - 1991

Miluse Roubickova - Banquet -1960-2012

Maurizio Mussati

Paola Marini, Pier Luigi Pizzi and Barbara Foscari

"Glass exists in various forms. Its dominant qualities are transparency, brilliance, radiance. It is richly extravagant. A hot material, like glowing lava. But glass can also be seen as mysterious, intimate, as the profound contemplation of a simple shape. Or these are moments when we suppress the qualities of glass almost entirely and transform it into a force that expands into excessive experience, into expression, into enigmatic explosive spheres..."

The works by Vladimír Kopecky - Svojanov 1931 - are strongly performative and site-specific pieces. He is well known for his use of transparent industrial glass as a “canvas” for abstract paintings of great chromatic breadth.

Vladimir Kopecky - Desire - 2021

Vladimir Kopecky - Corridor - White - Red - Blue - 1976-2017

Elisabeth Royer and France Thierard

"The twentieth century ended, and this fact forced us to analyze what was in the past, where we succeeded and where we failed. This is why it is very important for every detail of these historic Czech endeavors in the field of modern glass to be recorded and assessed..."

Special attention is devoted to the couple Stanislav Libensky - Sezemice 1921-2002 and Jaroslava Brychtova - Zelezny Brod 1924–2020 - who from the 1940s dedicated themselves to research and experimentation with glass casting or open-mould casting. Significantly, the casting method was to become synonymous with modern Czechoslovakian glass. For over sixty years, they investigated its technical possibilities and came up with works that were majestic in size, as well as remarkable in their purity of colour and transparency.

Stanislav Libensky - Jaroslava Brychtova - Installation

Stanislav Libensky - Lying Angel - 1999 - T-Space - 1999

Stanislav Libensky - Jaroslava Brychtova - Lying Angel - 1999-1920

Jean Blanchaert

Stanislav Libensky - Jaroslava Brychtova - Horizon - 1995-2006

The show closes with photographs by Josef Sudek - Kolin 1896–1976 - from the Glass Labyrinths series, taken within the exhibition Contemporary Bohemian Glass which was held in Prague in 1970 at the time of the 5th congress of the AIHV – the Association Internationale pour l’Histoire du Verre. By sharing his remarkable point of view, Sudek – often referred to as “the poet of Prague” – re-interprets the intrinsic relationship between glass and light in the works from this important, historic exhibition. Finally, the exhibition features five films produced between the 1980s and the present day, describing the unique creativity of the artists whose work is showcased.

Josef Sudek - Glass Labyrinths Series - Photographic Installation

Jean-Michel Ribettes