Martin Rosol

Martin Rosol is a glass artist born in 1952, in Prague, Czechoslovakia. He attended the School for Arts and Crafts in Prague from 1973-1976, then trained in coldworking at a company school designed to develop craftsmen to execute limited edition designs for art glass manufacturers.

Rosol, like many Czech glassworkers, learned his trade in a company school set up to train craftsmen to execute limited edition designs for art glass manufacturers. Though the arrangement provided employment for many, it did not provide young artists with the degree required by the old regime to sell art. He became adept at executing functional objects in the form of bowls and vases by day, then using the day’s leftover materials to create more abstract pieces at night. The communist government of Czechoslovakia at the time prohibited Rosol from selling his art, but he started shipping his art out of the country and soon he was exhibiting in Europe and the United States.  That path was unavailable to him in his native Czecholovakia before Vaclav Havel and the “Velvet Revolution” transformed that communist country into what is now known as the Czech Republic. Like many Czech glassworkers, Rosol learned his trade in a “company school” set up to train craftsmen to execute limited edition designs for art glass manufacturers. Though the arrangement provided employment for many, it did not provide young artists with the degree required by the old regime to sell art.  However, in 1981, Rosol was awarded the Bavarian State Prize for Glass Sculpture, an award given out each year in Munich for outstanding contributions in decorative art.

Eventually, through friends, Rosol had the opportunity to come to the U.S. on a visitor’s passport, to work with an established glass artist in New York State. He set up machines for the artist and worked with him in his studio, all the while perfecting his own work. Holsten Galleries in Stockbridge was among the first to sell some of his pieces during this time in the U.S. After five months his visa expired, and he had to return to Czechoslovakia permanently in the summer of 1986. Eventually Rosol, and his family, signed up for English classes together at Greenfield Community College. In 1994, The Rosol family became naturalized American citizens, and he now works in his own studio.

Influenced most by architectural studies, his sculptures, in the words on one admirer, are “works of elegant design and craftsmanship”. Made with several pieces of glass precisely cut from blocks of crystal, the glass is constructed in architectural forms after selected surfaces have been sand-blasted. The sculptures are multi-dimensional, some surfaces clear, some opaque. The results are “monuments to light”. Rosol’s forms—faceted like futuristic gemstones—are designed to maximize light, show off its myriad features, and captivate the viewer in an infinitely reflective and always evolving place. He begins his architectural sculptures by cutting blocks of flawless clear crystal and finishing the various sides with differing textures.  Polishing creates ice-like surfaces while sandblasting results in a softer opaqueness.  Areas of the glass are tinged with veneers of color that seem more prismatic illusion than real pigmentation. Finally, the parts are assembled in bifurcated geometric forms whose angles, intersections, and planes emanate with light and color. The magic of Rosol’s work is the ultimately harmonious feeling of balance it provides:  of light and dark, hard and soft, reality and perception, tension and ease, and solidity and ethereality.  From certain perspectives the sculptures may appear as mere figments of light’s imagination, but they are in fact the material creations of a master of his craft.

Rosol’s public collections include the American Craft Museum in New York, the Kanazawa Museum in Japan and the Moravian National Gallery in the Czech Republic.