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Václav Cigler

Václav Cigler

Born April 21 1929, Vsetín
Lived in Prague

"Václav Cigler is an internationally acclaimed artist who uses glass. He has worked with glass, in particular optical glass, since the late 1950's and he was the first artist in the world to realize the great potential this remarkable material has for artistic purposes. One of the main themes of his works was the natural environment and the human imprint on it. From 1959 he designed landscape projects based on the private "self" and defined phenomenologically through the senses. He created spherical objects, light columns, water bodies, geometrical flowers, and gardens of reason as spherical spaces or shapes, as models, and in the form of spatial contemplations of the landscape. In his works, Cigler also dealt with plastic objects made of cut optical glass, and he created designs and implementations of illuminants and jewellery, drawings, spatial objects, and architectural compositions. He dealt with light and sacral architecture. As an artist and teacher Václav Cigler greatly influenced the thoughts and works of several generations of artists."
(Jana Šindelová)

„I make glass without artistic ambitions but as a means of viewing and watching. I create non-technical devices which magnify, shrink, reflect, and decompose the light and colours of the surrounding environment.
I make diaphragms which filter the ambient world and transfer it to new chromacity and mophology. I offer a confrontation between the transformed reality and the original, undistorted reality.
Glass is an exciting material. It is material as much as it is immaterial. It is real as much as it is unreal. It is as independent as it is transcendent and, in a way, challenging to our sensory experience. Glass is probably the only material which can be continuously technologically developed and adapted for the implementation of the most fantastic notions and intentions. Glass has a human nature and fate.“
(Václav Cigler)


object, installation, land art, jewelery, glassmaking, graphics, drawing, architecture, public art
Gallery of the Central Bohemian Region
Moravian Gallery in Brno
Olomouc Museum of Art
Museum Kampa - The Jan and Meda Mládek Foundation
The North Bohemian Museum in Liberec
The Slovak National Gallery
The Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague
Baden Land Museum in Karlsruhe
Galéria Miloša Alexandra Bazovského v Trenčíne
The National Gallery in Prague
Gallery of Benedikt Rejt
Klatovy/Klenová Gallery
Milan Dobeš Museum
Stedelijk Museum
Victoria and Albert Museum
Museum of Glass and Jewellery in Jablonec nad Nisou
Museum of Decorative Arts | National Museums in Berlin
Museum Kunstpalast
Museum of Arts and Crafts Frankfurt
The Corning Museum of Glass
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

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