Václav Cigler born in 1929, is one of the preeminent artists working in glass today, as he has been for more than forty years. A master of the Czech glass movement, his innovations using optical glass have transformed the possibilities for the glass medium around the world. His work focuses on the most essential forms-circles, spheres, cylinders, rectangular elements-in which brilliant reflections and refractions of light play on and through his pieces to create a visually powerful and highly meditative atmosphere. Since the 1960s, Cigler has also done groundbreaking work in the field of land art. Here we see the use of water integrated into several pieces as a trace of his fascination with the landscape, with these works suggesting both tranquility and the flux of all natural things. The extraordinary craftsmanship required for these pieces in optical glass, which can take months to achieve, employing platinum-coated tanks and diamond tools to perfect the hardness, clarity, and formations of the glass, adds to their sense of rarity as well as to their immaculate precision. In this major survey of his recent work, you are entering a space of pure forms in which visual beauty is married to minimalist rationality. The art of Václav Cigler invites us to pay our closest attention to light and space-pulsing, shifting, constantly surprising our eyes-as we enter into his garden of reason.
