Glass objects usually make us think about glass products and their craft quality, but they don’t need to be placed in any museums or galleries. Just like in Venice and elsewhere, Prague shops offered glass products of varied quality for sale to tourists. This fairly large segment of the Czech glassmaking production was hit hard by the Covid pandemic, and only a fraction of it remains today. This is also a personal topic for Valner, because he has direct experience with managing a glass studio for making “tourist glass”. Because he had a large number of vases available from the previous glass production in Přibyslav, he transformed them into objects which historicize the utility of glass objects by means of cutting, grinding and gluing.

David Valner (* 1990) is the founder of the Valner Studio for design. His works are e.g. featured in the collections
of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, the German Ernsting Stiftung Alter Hof Herding Glassmuseum, Coesfeld, The Municipal Museum of Železný Brod, and in many private collections both in Czechia and abroad. Valner’s main medium consists of hand-crafted metallurgical glass, which he liberally leaves to its natural formations. He uses moulds only minimally, which is also why his pieces are created
as part of a series, although each piece remains a unique original. He celebrates any inflection to the original shape, any “flaw” in the glass, as a testament to its hand-made status. He finds his themes mostly in nature, but also in everyday reality and in the craft itself.