Ilja Bilek – Glass Objects

Exhibition date:  November – December 2010

Ilja Bílek creates precise glass sculptures inspired by architecture and nature, using color, form, and structure to express artistic intent. He contrasts opaque and transparent elements to explore light, reflection, and spatial balance.

In his plastic art, Ilja Bílek deals with assembling three-dimensional segments of melted or sheet glass. He creates wholes in his compositions that are often based on architectural or natural principles in their shape economy and rationality in design principles. The color or individual parts, the shape, and the rationality of their arrangements into a designed whole are the keys to deciphering their artistic intention.

His technically complicated objects that consist of perfectly cut and glued parts take entirely advantage of the capacities of the material glass: its transparency and its light reflections. Ilja Bílek likes contrasts; thus he combines opaque glass with transparent glass or flat forms with three-dimensional forms, eventually forming well-balanced glass plastics. Between 1995 – 2017 he has been working as the professor of the glass studio at J. E. Purkyne University in Usti nad Labem (CZ).