CGD

František Vízner (b.1936) is a legend of glass design admired across generations. However, glass was not the subject of his choice but of the political circumstances of the early 1950s. His studies started at the Secondary School of Glassmaking in Nový Bor, continued at the Glassmaking School in Železný Brod and finished at the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design in Prague in the Studio of Glassmaking and Glyptics headed by Prof. Karel Štipl, with doc. Václav Plátek as the most inspiring figure. VÍzner's opinions on design have been fundamentally influenced by his admiration of Scandinavian industrial design. He was lucky enough that he started his career as a designer in the time when Czech glass-making started to experience a boom. He was also lucky in the choice of his discipline: pressed glass, easy to reproduce, was not only exported in huge amounts, but also launched onto the local market. František VÍzner has never been afraid of new challenges. Thus, he shifted his focus from pressed glass to hot-shaped glass and contributed a great deal of innovative work in this field as well. At the same time, he started to concentrate on the production of unique, cut glass objects. Since the second half of the 1970s, he has created an entire range of harmoniously balanced, mostly monochromic cut objects with a spiritual tone, out of which the the so-called pointed dish could be labeled Iconic. Like in his previous designer work, Vízner endows glass with simple geometrical shapes such as cylinders, spheres, hemispheres, and prisms. He has never abandoned the dimension of "two human palms", ie. a thinking that originates in design, architecture, sculpture, and primarily in the search for order. František Vízner says that he "hates the word experiment.“ In 1971, dr. Alena Adlerová, then a curator at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, described his work as follows: "Vízner is not a pioneer of new revolutionary paths, but a creator of values which I, legitimately, consider to maintain their visual validity in many decades to follow. For an artist, this is not easy to achieve, indeed." Now we know that time has proven her correct.

Milan Hlaveš

The master of Czech glassmaking, František Vízner (born 9. 3. 1936 in Prague) received his apprenticeship in glasspainting at the Secondary School of Glassmaking in Nový Bor (1951–53). He graduated from the Glassmaking School in Železný Brod (1953–56; Studio of Melted Sculpture and Stained Glass headed by Jan Černý) and the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design in Prague (1956–1962; Studio of Glassmaking and Glyptics headed by Prof. Karel Štipl, Václav Plátek, Jozef Soukup, drawing by Jan Bauch). During 1962–67, Vízner worked as a designer for OBAS – Sklo Union Glassworks in Dubí upon Teplice, producing a series of pressed glass objects. Later, during 1967–77, he worked with hot-shaped glass at the Centre of Arts and Crafts Glassworks in Škrdlovice. Since 1977, cut glass has become the preliminary practice to Vízner. In his own studio in Žďár nad Sázavou, he works with the grindstone creating bowl and vase forms, which are characteristic of his work. Vízner has also dealt with the use of glass in numerous architectural realizations of the 1970's and 1980's, collaborating with well-known architects (for example, the glass tiling in Charles Square Station in Prague Subway).