Opening Friday, January 15th
“The whole earth, visible and invisible, lives mysteriously within man…” The timeless words of Czech poet Otokar Březina from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries could be a leitmotif for the life journey of Vladimira Klumpar – and a motto for her art. In Klumparová’s case, art and life are bound together by experience, adventure and inspiration from surprisingly diverse environments, starting with the picturesque towns of Bohemia’s foothills – first Potštejn, where Klumparová was born and grew up, then Železný Brod and the local glass school where she attended secondary school. During her university years, the beauty of historical Prague undoubtedly influenced the young artist’s sensibilities, but the main influence on her talent came from the time she spent in the famed studio of professor Stanislav Libensky at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design. Thanks to this charismatic teacher, Klumpar developed a genuine relationship to glass as a distinctive artistic material. Soon thereafter, a series of important events opened up the world for her. She arrived in the United States with an academic title, but here another school was waiting for her, this time the hardest of all – the school of life. It is from this school that she learned the most. It taught her to take an independent approach to art and gave her the space for experimenting with fused and slumped glass or combining glass with plaster and various laminates. It encouraged Vladimira Klumpar to engage in patient trials that enabled a novel approach to the grinding and painting of glass and helped her find unconventional approaches to the modeling of various materials for molten glass sculptures. Her subsequent long-term stays in Mexico influenced not only her aesthetic style, but also provided her with a new outlook on the importance of colors. From here, we can trace her original approach to the magical colorfulness of glass objects and their inner spaces.
Vladimira Klumpar’s art alternates between an emphasis on geometric forms and organic forms. Sometimes her works contain a hidden inspiration from the dynamism of America, while at other times they possess a yearning for peace, harmony and being in consonance with Czech or Mexican nature. Generally speaking, however, her work is characterized by a philosophical subtext and poetic playfulness that makes it accessible to sensitive and perceptive audiences throughout the world”. – Oldřich Palata