Beyond Glass: A Tribute To The Art of Glass

The project Beyond Glass was created as a continuation of the platform Flowers for Slovakia, founded in 2010 by designers Lars Kemper and Peter Olah, to convey the beauty of contemporary design rooted in craft. The platform’s motto To give a flower is to share beauty is symbolically transformed into the project Beyond Glass — to give beauty means to share an experience, emotion and contact with others.

Personal memory as inspiration The common inspiration for the collection Beyond Glass was the authors’ personal memories connected to Slovakia. Ten designers from Slovakia and the Czech Republic: Barbora Babocká, Petr Brancuský, Ondřej Čižmář, Barbora Hagarová, Sára Kordová, Karolína Kučerová, Alexander Kupko, Adam Trup, Dávid Valovič, and Klára Valušková created a collection of experimental objects based on their personal memories and experiences. Each work represents a fragment of individual reality translated into the medium of glass, a material paradoxical in its nature — present yet almost invisible; hard yet fragile; precise yet elusive.

The authors find beauty in the emotion that resonates with them for a long time. The collection combines not only the authors’ unique personal experience, but also their individuality in the creation and design process — working with the softness of the material in the object by Karolína Kučerová or the optical illusion in the work by Klára Valušková. Unlike previous collections of the platform Flowers for Slovakia, the collection Beyond Glass seeks to move closer to conceptual creation, in close cooperation with the authors themselves, who also contribute their own inspirations and ideas and actively participate in the artisanal production of the objects throughout the ongoing design process. Each object is the author’s individual expression and reflects not only their memories from the past, but also the current nature of their work, whether the paint and material processing in Barbora Babocká’s work or the technical detail in Adam Trup’s work. The collection features personal references: respect and admiration for nature in Ondřej Čižmář’s object, the importance of cohesion and friendship in Sára Kordová’s object or nostalgia in Barbora Hagarová’s work. The experimental collection of objects thus carries both individual and collective resonance. The collection Beyond Glass was first presented at the 27th International Festival Designblok 2025 at the Křižík Pavilions in Prague. The overarching theme of the festival was courage — a theme that organically overlaps with the project’s very essence. This year, Designblok emphasised the courage to push work further, to enter uncharted territories, to combine traditional crafts with the latest technologies, and to seek new solutions without worrying about the originality of the artistic expression. These principles are also closely linked to the collection Beyond Glass.

Courage manifests in the project on several levels. It is the courage to bring the glass collection back to Bohemia — a region that is home to some of the richest and most vibrant centres of glassmaking tradition in Europe. It is also about the courage to once again contact the LASVIT company, which has developed into a world leader in art glass over the past fifteen years, and thus to enter into a dialogue between the academic environment and internationally established practice. An equally important gesture was to expand the selection of young designers to include the Czech Republic, even though the collection’s theme is deeply rooted in the Slovak cultural context. This step required openness and the belief that the power of collective creation grows precisely from diversity and mutual enrichment.