Czech & Slovak Glass

Artist and teacher Václav Cigler (b. 1929) constantly explores the laws of nature in his creative work, particularly those governing optical effects. What fascinates him above all are things like transparency, the refraction of light and the emanation of light. To him, these effects are almost magical, and he therefore refers to glass as the medium of sensory perception. From 11 November, Kunstmuseum Den Haag will be showing selected examples of late twentieth-century glass art from Czechoslovakia. Each of these glass objects, made by Cigler, Stanislav Libenský, their students and like-minded makers, has its own distinct character.

Kunstmuseum Den Haag houses one of the finest and most complete collections of glass in the Netherlands, encompassing glassware that originated in the Roman Empire and the Islamic cultural region, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Western European glass, Dutch glassware from the interwar period and work by contemporary makers. The collection also includes late twentieth-century glass art from Czechoslovakia, today’s Czech Republic and Slovakia.

The driving forces behind glass objects of this type were artist and teacher Václav Cigler, who founded the ‘glass in architecture’ department at the art academy in Bratislava in 1965, and artist Stanislav Libenský (1921 – 2002), who became head of the glass department at the art academy in Prague in 1964. What emerged in these two countries is a completely unique optical glass art that makes maximum use of the effects of light.

Kunstmuseum Den Haag’s collection of optical glass is based largely on the impressive collection of the late Sam Jonker and Valantine Zaremba, which is kept at the museum.  Jonker and Zaremba had a particular love of abstract-geometric Slovakian glassware, and Cigler’s work is the focus of the collection. 

Cigler approaches his creative work as research. The optical effects of transparency and of light give him endless opportunities to shape and manipulate his medium. The beauty of the meticulously constructed autonomous abstract form is central to his work. The form invites us to observe with great concentration, thereby enabling us to create for ourselves images that constantly change.