Josef Marek – Freed from Gravity

M.A. Josef Marek is ranked among the foremost contemporary sculptors working with glass. He combines exceptional talent, practical sculptural training, and a strong imagination to explore the unique potential of glass from multiple perspectives. Marek masterfully harnesses the natural properties of the material—its translucency, optical depth, and ability to refract light—to create illusionistic, almost unreal objects.

Often working with pure geometric shapes in their most abstract form, he creates mysterious, weightless structures that seem to defy gravity. His minimalist aesthetic lends a sense of meditative clarity. By precisely controlling the angle of light and its interaction with color, Marek reveals unexpected perspectives, turning each sculpture into a shifting visual experience.

Antonios Sophocleus Evangelinos about the artist Josef Marek: 

I believe I am not the first to notice that what Josef Marek has achieved in his visions and has materialized in his glass sculptures is certainly extraordinary and hugely important. It is a monumental contribution to the cause of consciously attaining our totality in beauty and beatitude, to the cause of the knowledge of our Self in a state of silent and humble methexis (μέθεξις) of the Primordial Beauty.

“We mostly live in Shadows. Greatest mysteries, silent all pervading Truths, are written in the language of myths and poetry and in the silent language of sculptures”.

Are we guessing at shadows in firelight? Are we trapped in sensory modalities? This is the essence of the platonic Myth of the Cave. Can one positively experiment on the Myth? I must answer “yes”. And this is how to do it sculpturally: Ideas, universal Forms, come and seize your mind. It simply happens. The rest is just hard work. Carefully stage lines and surfaces, volumes and cavities, presence and absence, paths of light and shadows, all in glass, all in various degrees of transparency. Set up the alchemical laboratory of the senses and the perceiving mind. Then… snap ! An undeniable illusion is suddenly standing in front of our very own puzzled eyes. The ordinary senses are ceasing, stopping, slowing down from wandering endlessly. An illusion with no tangible material/substratum has opened the gate that leads from the tangible to the Idea. Nous (Mind) emerges, seeing inside itself, coming to itself, seeing beyond the spatiotemporal, mainly processual, functional walls and boundaries raised by the gravity and the opacity of the sensible three dimensional, limited, commonplace objects. Freed from gravity and opacity, the Mind is sliding over academic chatter, to enter into this silent, non verbal visual lab and ponder on the eternal non-individualistic truths about our hidden Oneness, our one and only essence as responsive and experiencing beings. In full splendour and with convincing power, aided by Marek distinctively clear sculptural visualisation, the most abstract elements of the platonic Myth of the Cave are facing us, ready to discuss with us, but impossible to argue with us – since Ideal Beauty excludes the option of arguing. This is the summit of the human mysteries.

Antonios Sophocleus Evangelinos – Physicist, Ontologist, and Philosopher  – Lesvos, 2014