František Vizner, in a recent photo from his artist website at www.frantisekvizner.com.
Just months after celebrating his 75th brithday, Czech glass artist František Vizner died on July 1st, 2011. Trained at the famous glassmaking schools in Nový Bor and Železný Brod, Vizner completed his studies at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague, graduating in 1962. His first job as a glass designer was at Sklo Union in Teplice, where he would spend five years before exploring hot-shaped art glass at the Centre of Arts and Crafts Glassworks in ?krdlovice. VÍzner dedicated his career to distinctive geometric sculpture beginning in 1975, spending decades in pursuit of perfect forms ground and cut to exquisite minimalist volumes at his studios in ??ár and Sázavou.
Vizner mined the tension between functional and purely sculptural forms in his decades of exceptionally fabricated work that explored mass and interior volume like nobody before him.
Vizner was active with exhibitions and design lines in 2011. His last exhibition was in the Czech Republic. Titled “František VÍzner: Ateliér” at Galerie Nová sÍ? in Prague, it ran from March 9th through April 30th, 2011. His last design line was for Bohemia Machine Glass, a Czech-based company offering refined glassware and other products.
A kind if somewhat stoic presence, Vizner explored pure forms in his 36-year-career as an independent artist, and his work embodied the tension between function and purely sculptural forms. Like other Czech sculptors using the material of glass, the heavy volume and poetric translucence were primary aspects of his work, but Vizner employed precision cutting and grinding to create machine-like negative volumes that surgically subtracted geometric shapes, creating fertile abstractions within sleek overall forms.
Vizner influenced the Studio Glass movement in the United States since his work was included in the Corning Museum’s landmark exhibition, “New Glass: A Worldwide Survey” in 1979. His work would again be exhibited at the museum with the solo exhibition “Masters of Studio Glass: František VÍzner” in 2009.