Yesterday, while looking at "Bohemian Glass: The Great Glass Masters", an exhibition (running until November 26th) at Le Stanze del Vetro on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, in Venice, we mentioned Václav Cigler.
In that post we explored his passion for geometries but didn't analyze his jewelry pieces: there is actually a selection of his drawings for jewelry pieces and a small section with some designs in the same exhibition.
Born in Vsetín in 1929, after his initial studies at the glass school in Nový Bor, Cigler moved to the School of Applied Art in Prague, where he became a student of Josef Kaplický from 1951 to 1957. Cigler attributes much of his creative freedom to Josef Kaplický, who encouraged a studio environment where artists could work without constraints.
In the 1960s, Cigler gained recognition for his geometric creations crafted from cut solid optical glass. The meticulous craftsmanship required for Cigler's optical glasswork, involving techniques that could span months, included the use of platinum-coated tanks and diamond tools to achieve the glass's desired hardness, clarity, and forms. This painstaking process contributed to the production of extraordinary pieces.
As seen in yesterday's feature and in the images accompanying that post, light is a pivotal element in Cigler who has a passion for playing with reflections along the glass's edges and within its fissures. Rather than disrupting the unity of a solid block with reflections, Cigler explores the interplay between interior and exterior spaces, a unique possibility afforded by transparent glass.
But this dichotomic fascination with indoor and outdoor settings is also reflected in his minimalist, modern and elegant jewelry pieces (that also appeared in the 2014 exhibition "Unique by Design: Contemporary Jewelry in the Donna Schneier Collection," at the Metropolitan Museum in New York), the result of his fascination with negative spaces.
Jewelry pieces are conventionally employed to adorn the wearer's body that becomes the carrier of the piece, activating it. In Cigler's artistic practice, visual beauty is harmonized with minimalist design principles, but, instead of merely adorning the wearer, Cigler's jewelry pieces take on a unique role, they establish indeed relationships and interactions with the spaces surrounding the wearer's body.
A quote attributed to Cigler on the Central European Art Database (CEAD), an online archive documenting the visual arts and culture of Central Europe post-World War II, reads: "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 colors of the surrounding environment." This statement also applies to his jewelry creations.
The drawings on display, dating back to 1965, feature sections of faces accentuated by geometric elements.
As stated earlier on, Cigler often created pieces moving from the negative spaces surrounding the body and, among the other drawings, one shows a headpiece encircling the wearer's head, adorned with a geometric pendant positioned in front of the face. This pendant, somewhat obstructs the wearer's vision while simultaneously serving as a filtering screen for perceiving the world. Moreover, it cleverly acts as a rear-view mirror, ensuring that nothing interesting occurring behind the wearer goes unnoticed.
Reflecting on the unique properties of glass, Cigler once remarked during an exhibition in Tel Aviv, Israel: "Glass is the most imaginative material that man has ever created. The presence of glass in a human space conditions not only the space itself but also the user. Glass is for me a pretext for expressing a different spatial and emotional perception of the world. A perception made unique by the optical means offered by this material, as well as by the new possibilities for using it in space.”
The exhibition at Le Stanze del Vetro, features several necklaces that have a strong connection with Cigler's exploration of spaces: the selection includes kinetic metal jewelry pieces and cut and polished clear optical glass and metal designs. Most pieces on display hail from 1965-67, but there are a couple designed in collaboration with architect Michal Motyčka that were reinterpretations of pieces designed in the '60s and issued in 2017.
What unifies these pieces is their commitment to essential forms, characterized by circles, spheres, cylinders, and square elements. Their aesthetic is reminiscent of the high-tech allure of spacecraft and futuristic vehicles and evokes memories of fashion photoshoots from the early Space Age featuring models clad in designs by Pierre Cardin or André Courrèges.
Cigler once remarked that for him glass was a sort of "magic material", "tangible" yet also "intangible", physical, but also spiritual, as it has mass and yet it defies it; pure like water and transparent like air, for Cigler glass was "a box, an envelope, a tool, a mediator and a memory". This profound perspective finds vivid expression in his jewelry pieces, suspended between the ethereal and the solid, the real and the abstract, inviting viewers to contemplate the interplay of geometric elements, light, and the infinite opportunities of glass.
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