Art
Jaroslava Brychtova, Creator of Monumental Glass Art, Dies at 95 – The New York Times
Jaroslava Brychtova, an internationally acclaimed Czech artist who made large-scale glass sculptures with her husband and collaborator, Stanislav Libensky, pioneering new ways to work with glass, form and light, died on April 8 in Jablonec nad Nisou, a town in the Czech Republic. She was 95.
Her death, from what was thought to be heart failure, was confirmed by Katya Heller, whose Heller Gallery in Manhattan represents the couple.
From the late 1950s until 2002, when Mr. Libensky died, Ms. Brychtova and her husband created an ambitious body of work that could be likened more to painting, sculpture and architecture than to something that rests on a tabletop. Some works topped 13 tons and towered 14 feet. Many featured negative space, like cuts, to allow light to penetrate. The best of them merged art and science through the material of colored glass to profound effect.
“Red Pyramid” (1993), one of several works by the couple in the permanent collection of the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, N.Y., is a simple pyramidal shape, almost three feet tall, that looks to be glowing dramatically from within. It was created using a technique the artists developed called mold melting, whereby chunks of glass are placed in molds and left to slowly melt inside a kiln.
“When you stand in front of one of their works, you feel the power they brought to it,” said Susie J. Silbert, curator of postwar and contemporary glass at the Corning Museum. “The forms are so bold, so strong, and the glass is so expressive.”
Mr. Libensky made the paintings and drawings, while Ms. Brychtova translated and interpreted his designs into three dimensions, using clay models to perfect the shapes and surfaces.
She played another essential role behind the scenes: She was in charge of the architectural glass studio where their work was produced, in her hometown, Zelezny Brod. While Mr. Libensky spent weekdays in Prague teaching at the Academy of Decorative Arts, Ms. Brychtova pushed the studio workers under her charge to achieve their vision.
“The sheer will and determination she had to get this all done is remarkable,” Ms. Heller said. “Particularly when you see the scale of these pieces.”
In a documentary film about the couple, “The Space of Light,” Ms. Brychtova acknowledged that she was “pretty tough within the factory environment,” adding, “I wasn’t very popular because I was always striving for the best.”
She and her husband sought to make glass sculpture that could stand alone without a pedestal. They achieved it with the Vestments, a series made in the late 1990s. On its website, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which owns “Vestment II” (1997), described the sculpture, of muted gray glass, as “reminiscent of a liturgical garment,” appearing “opaque and grandiose but at other times almost weightless.”
Though admirers and critics focused on the massiveness of her work, Ms. Brychtova insisted in the documentary that scale was not the biggest challenge. “It’s ideas that are hard to get to, not size,” she said.
Jaroslava Brychtova was born on July 18, 1924, to artistic parents. Her mother, Anna Pekarkova, created hand-woven textiles. Her father, Jaroslav Brychta, was a sculptor and glassmaker who also founded a local school that taught glassmaking techniques as well as design, chemistry and technology. He was a major influence on her life.
Ms. Brychtova followed her father into the arts, studying sculpture at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design and at the Academy of Fine Arts, both in Prague, before returning to Zelezny Brod, a small town in north Bohemia with centuries-old glassmaking tradition. She spent nearly all her life there.
It was in Zelezny Brod, in the early 1950s, that Ms. Brychtova met Mr. Libensky, who was the director of the glass school and, like her, married at the time. They divorced their spouses, causing a minor scandal, and embarked on the fruitful partnership that first drew notice at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, where they showed colored glass blocks with reliefs of wild animals.
In Communist Czechoslovakia, where the couple made their seminal work, artists who might have otherwise been censored could hide out in the “minor” art of glass while pursuing ideas like abstraction. The couple’s work was underwritten by the state, at least initially, and they exhibited at World Expos in Montreal in 1967 and Osaka, Japan, in 1970.
They also created many public works in the Czech Republic, including the facade of the National Theater and the stained-glass windows for St. Vitus Cathedral, both in Prague, as well as a relief inside the striking Jested Tower.
After the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Communists cracked down on artists. Ms. Brychtova and Mr. Libensky were expelled from the party and forbidden to travel abroad together for a time.
Over the decades, as their international reputation grew and their work was displayed at the Met and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, a younger generation of female glass artists drew inspiration from Ms. Brychtova.
She is survived by two sons, Jaroslav and Milos Zahradnik, and a daughter, Alena Vavrikova, all from her first marriage.
A stylish woman with a distinctive mop top of gray hair, Ms. Brychtova retained an “age-defying curiosity” about art and culture to the end of her life, Ms. Heller said. But she stopped making glass works after the death of Mr. Libensky, telling the Czech News Agency on the occasion of her 90th birthday: “It is impossible without Stanislav. I am used to working in a couple. Without him, it just isn’t right.”
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Unique art collection on display CTV News Vancouver
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Art
This N.B. artist joined an online movement. Now her art is being shown across the world. – CBC.ca
Since joining a community that dreams of an internet free from giant corporations that can exploit users’ time and data, Victoria West’s digital artwork has been exhibited across the globe.
West, a photographer and digital artist based in Burton, 30 kilometres southeast of Fredericton, has had her work shown in Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Townsville in northeastern Australia, Miami, New York City, and even a museum in Albuquerque, N.M., — all through connections she’s made in Web3.
West warned it was a “rabbit hole,” but what she found in wonderland she doesn’t believe she’d find anywhere else.
Web3 is a future version of the internet.
The work of Victoria West, a photographer and digital artist based in Burton, was recently showcased at an immersive exhibit in the Big Apple.
Web1, West said, was the first version of the internet, in which users passively consumed information.
As the 2000s dawned, Web2 emerged, and users could now post their own content — think Twitter, blogs, YouTube. People are now creating more and more in digital spaces, but the downside of Web2 is that corporations are technically still the owners of all that creation, and they could take your data and potentially do with it as they please.
Enter Web3, which still exists more in theory: nobody and everybody owns the internet. This version aims to be decentralized. It doesn’t eradicate the distrust some people have in mega companies like Google and Meta — it just removes the need for it, because no one person or organization can own the blockchain Web3 operates on.
West said within Web3 there’s an art movement, with artists working together and taking control of their work. Imagine if Leonardo da Vinci had an internet connection, as well as Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello. It’s the renaissance all over again, West said, except it’s happening with digital art.
“And it’s happening online on a much bigger scale.”
Before learning about W3 in 2021, West said she was in a photography bubble.
Photography isn’t the art form West imagined herself pursuing when she was younger. But when she bought a camera after the first commercial digital models arrived on the market in the mid-2000s, she was hooked.
“I was bothering everybody around me to take their portrait,” she said.
She built up her portraiture business, becoming involved with the Professional Photographers of Canada and competing in photography contests. Still, West didn’t want to just capture moments — she wanted to make them.
That’s when artificial intelligence came on the scene.
West was using Midjourney, a generative AI program, when it was still in beta testing. Around the same time she became involved with Web3, she experimented with blending AI-produced textures into her photography. In her business, AI quickened her workflow and allowed her to change backdrops and furniture.
While creating a piece in 2023 called When I Die, West wanted to design a man underground with roots blossoming into a tree. Well, there aren’t any blossoming trees in Canada in February, West joked — so she made the tree using AI.
“I feel like someone took handcuffs off me, and I’m free,” she said.
Lauren Cruikshank, an associate professor in culture and media studies at the University of New Brunswick, has spoken about the use of AI in universities, but she also thinks about it through an artistic lens.
From the camera to spell check, Cruikshank said the same discussion happens with each new medium: how much of the artistry belongs to the artist, how much to the tools they’re using?
“For some people where it gets uncomfortable is where the role of the human is minimal compared to how much the AI tool is creating or having creative influence,” she said.
With AI, Cruikshank agreed there are degrees — there’s a difference between prompting an AI to generate an image of a beautiful sunset and claiming it as your artwork and what West is doing, combining AI with her own artistry.
“That sounds really compelling to me,” Cruikshank said.
When West first saw Lume Studios on Broadway in lower Manhattan, the place she’d eventually display Eden’s Dye, her immersive art exhibit, she knew she wanted it immediately.
She collaborated on the exhibit with some of her Web3 friends. Los Angeles actors and poets Laurence Fuller and Vincent D’Onofrio wrote poetry to accompany each piece of art, which West created using both photography and AI. A coder friend joined the crew, and the result was a floor-to-ceiling immersive exhibit. West’s collaborators also choreographed performances to complement the art, using music produced by AI.
“Why wouldn’t I do that if I can?” West asked. “It’s freeing, I think, and lets you push the boundaries of photography and what you can do with it.”
While the exhibit leaned heavily on romantic, classical themes and Baroque aesthetics, Eden’s Dye is almost a premonition: minted, digital artwork taking up entire walls in people’s homes, flowers growing from code, experiencing art in virtual realms.
Demand will only grow, West said. Technology will progress and the internet will change. But what she really wanted was for people to walk into Eden’s Dye and be amazed by the art they were experiencing.
“They came because of the art, and they were there enjoying the art. You don’t really need to understand anything beyond that.”
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These aren’t your grandma’s quilts.
Being a grandmother herself, Lorna Costantini said she’s not a huge fan of the above phrase, but she can’t help but use it to describe modern quilting.
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