Martin Rosol (Born 1963) Czech/American, Glass Statue. Late 20th century, sand-blasted, cut and polished glass. Etched signature and number on edge "Martin Rosol 1439". 

Size: 12 x 14 1/2 in.
#5072 . 

Martin Rosol was born in Czechoslovakia and learned his trade in a “company school” set up to train craftsmen to execute limited edition designs for art glass manufacturers. At night, using scrap from the day’s production, he created his own larger, more abstract pieces. However, a career as a studio glass artist was out of Martin’s reach in his native Czecholovakia before Vaclav Havel and the “Velvet Revolution” transformed the communist country into what is now known as the Czech Republic. Martin’s pursuit of this dream took him and his family on a journey from Czechoslovakia to Hungary, to Yugoslavia, to Austria then to Germany, where they waited for two years to get visas to emigrate to the U.S. In 1994. The Rosol family became naturalized American citizens and they now live in Massachusetts, where Martin works in his own studio.

Influenced most by architectural studies, Martin’s 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 public collections include the American Craft Museum in New York, the Kanazawa Museum in Japan and the Moravian National Gallery in the Czech Republic.