ABOUT ME

Glass

the material, object, element of interior and exterior… Multiple at his functions and always present around us… often imperceptible… There is a window-pane, a wall of building and logo. It function is both as a thing of applied art and a work art.

Glass is a graceful material for the architect, designer, craftsman and artisan. Using glass, they can project and create everything from modern buildings, sliding doors,table or chairs, stairs, stained glass, lamps, frames and crockery. Glass endows sculpture and all art work with beauty by the play of light and colours.

And the Form…?

Looking for the form, for purely formal solutions – this credo has become a kind of challenge as the time passed. As play, bantering at a substance that is graceful, sometimes refractory, demanding precise knowledge, and often, compromises. Cool approach to the substance, whose beauty is shaped under the influence of high temperature, and softens to be freely formed, is impossible. One has to think about glass warmly…

Ryszard Michałek

(from catalogue of exhibition Glass Around Us. Looking For the Form, Gallery “Design”, BWA Wrocław)

He lives and works in Wrocław (Poland). He projected and participated in the realization a stained glass complex in the Parish Church in Lipiny, in the Monastery of Elizabethan Sisters at Ostrów Tumski in Wrocław, in the chapel in the Convent of School Brothers in Częstochowa, among other things. At present, he has been occupied with projection of applied glass.

Early work involved painting and stained glass. Fusing glass technique was not well known in Poland but he was fascinated with hot glass and first work - big objects he has made in the glass kiln of Tornati-Forni.

The whole process of fusing glass there is arduous on hot formation and labour-consuming. Each detail decides about final effect, but most important is the experience and imagination of artist.