LITVAK | Jiřina Žertovà Bio

Jiřina Žertovà belongs to the senior generation of leading Czech glass artists. From the earliest days of the European studio-glass movement she has been represented at all major exhibitions featuring work from her country. She was born in Prague in 1932 and is still based in her native city. After attending the graphic design school there, she studied from 1950 to 1955 under Josef Kaplický in the glass department of the School of Applied Art. She subsequently worked as a designer of utility wares for the Czech glass industry, but in the early 1970s began devoting herself exclusively to independent work. Searching for a new artistic approach, Žertovà found herself pioneering a kind of work in which the inherent properties of glass no longer played a dominant role. She departed more and more from conventional decorative techniques and started painting with opaque colors on thick-walled, mould-blown pieces. This amounted to sacrilege at the time. In effect, she was agreeing with the avowed aim of Vladimìr Kopecký to "demythologize" glass. Since then Žertovà has tempered the radicalism of her work. She now stacks sheets of flat glass on top of one another; either stepped or around a wooden core, then paints them thickly with bright colors so that light striking the glass makes it look as though fibers are growing out of the sculpture.

Žertovà's work is featured in numerous public collections throughout Europe and the United States, including Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, Glasmuseet Ebeltoft in Ebeltoft, Denmark, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg in Coburg, Germany, mudac, Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Lausanne, Switzerland and National Museum,Wrocław, Poland.

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Howard Ben Tré - Peter Bremers - Lucio Bubacco - José Chardiet - Dale Chihuly - Václav Cigler - Daniel Clayman - Richard Jolley - Joey Kirkpatrick & Flora Mace - Vladimír Kopecký - Dante Marioni - Tobias Mǿhl - William Morris - Štěpán Pala - Zora Palová - Jaromír Rybák - Davide Salvadore - Lino Tagliapietra - Bertil Vallien - Julius Weiland - Ann Wolff - Jiřina Žertovà