A Selection from the History of Glass Art at the 2nd National Salon of Design and Art A With the selection of Spanning – Light – Years the organisers seek to highlight some of the often undeservedly unknown or forgotten Hungarian glass innovators, patents as well as trend-setting and community-forming oeuvres, a few of these not only having exerted a major influence on domestic glass art but playing a significant role in an international context too.
We will evoke the oeuvre of Leo Valentin Pantocsek, born in Upper Hungary, without whose innovation of splendid iridescent glass surfaces with a splendid play of spectral colours the legacy of Lobmeyr, Loetz and Tiffany might have been recorded differently in art history. We are paying tribute to Dr Zoltán Veress and his colleagues, who were R&D engineers and designers in the former Karcag Glass Factory and patented veil glass in 1961. By courtesy of a private collection, the exhibition will include a collection with a special light refraction that demonstrates the forms and colours unique to that time. We will introduce Júlia Báthory, who, upon returning from Paris, lent impetus to secondary school glass education and by establishing a glass studio at the glass programme at the Secondary School of Visual Arts took the initial steps towards the Hungarian kiln-formed studio glass art movement. We will remember Zoltán Bohus, who, following the best traditions of the university glass education established by Pál Paulikovics and György Z. Gács, taught generations of glass artists, and taking the Hungarian studio glass movement to the next level they set out on the path towards world fame together with his fellow artists. The exhibition will also assign space to a process developed and patented by two young artists at the start of their careers in the 1970s and it will introduce some of the founding masters of the Mária Goszthony International Glass Artists Colony in Bárdudvarnok, where “glass and the cause of glass were never allowed to go cold”.
Eleonóra Balogh
Noémi Ferenczy Award-winning glass artist