Václav cigler: seeing through
EXHIBITION DURATION: JUNE 15 - AUGUST 30, 2025
EXHIBITION OPENING: JUNE 14, 2025 | 3:00 PM
EXHIBITION CLOSING: APRIL 30, 2025
GUIDED TOUR: 30 AUGUST 2025 | 5:00 PM | EXHIBITION CLOSING EVENT
EXHIBITION AUTHORS: JANA ŠINDELOVÁ, MICHAL MOTYČKA
EXHIBITION ARCHITECT: MICHAL MOTYČKA
The exhibition “Václav Cigler Seeing Through” presents the artist’s lifelong creative efforts, reflections on glass and its meaning. Václav Cigler began using the most demanding glassmaking techniques and technologies in the late 1950s and has been engaged in free art and glass creative work in the field of design, including construction and illumination glass as well as technical and utility glass. He was the first in the history of art to use industrial, optical glass to create a work of art. He has experimented with the scale of his art objects and subsequently with the use of optical glass as a material, for sculpturally conceived, fused and polished glass monumental objects of convex-concave forms, shaped as lenses or prisms. His extensive body of work, in the form of minimalist or symbolic sculptures made of clear optical glass and metal, comprises spatial installations or objects, from a flower to an egg, a wellspring and yet more, e.g. a vertical axis converging to an apex point.
Václav Cigler perceives glass as a substance with spiritual overlap, which has fascinated him for over seventy years, in a certain sense embodying the Image of Man. Through it he seeks to get closer to the mystery of germinal energy, the principle and meaning of life. By way of a dialogue, he asks questions that seek to find the limits to human knowledge and the levels on which we transcend them. Cigler’s glass sculptures are focused on the inner experience of depicting light as an immaterial substance, a means of vision and a source of energy.
The universal spatial solution is based on the assumption of a specific situation, expressible by glass as a substance. Each object has a different character based on the principle of the given space that envelops us in the surrounding world. Creating surroundings, contexts, is an essential aspect of Cigler’s glass sculpture, as is our own presence, attention, envisioning and imagination.
The sculptor and teacher Václav Cigler, born on 21 April 1929 in Vsetín, is the founder of the international conceptual approach to glass as an art object. In his work he anticipated the emerging concepts of contemporary artistic expression (constructive tendencies, minimalism, land art, light and kinetic sculpture). He was selected to participate in major international exhibitions (1959 at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, USA, 1957 and 1960 at the 11th and 12th Triennials in Milan, Expo 58 in Brussels, 1964 at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts of the American Craft Council in New York), followed by the Expo 67 exhibition in Montreal, where his prismatic sculpture won his first international honourable mention. In 1965 he founded and until 1979 led the Glass in Architecture studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. Václav Cigler’s artworks are represented in many galleries and collections in the Czech Republic and around the world.
Michal Motyčka and Jana Šindelová
