Toyama Glass Art Museum: Collection Exhibition: Mingling Materials
I believe first of all that artists in future will not work with glass alone: they will get involved in other media and different working techniques – thus there will no longer exist a strictly defined category of glass artist. I think rather that there will be artists who work with glass as well as with other materials.*
So said Czech glass artist Bohumil ELIÁŠ (1937–2005) in a 1994 interview, in response to a question about the future of glass art. Thirty years later one can safely say that precisely as Eliáš predicted, it is now commonplace to combine glass with other materials, and work with different materials and methods alongside glass production. This exhibition of works from the collection celebrates the vast breadth of expression born out of encounters between glass and other materials and means of production.
* “30th September 1994, Interview with Bohumil Eliáš” by Takeda Atsushi, in Expanded Glass: Traditional and Contemporary, exh. cat. (Yokohama Museum of Art, 1995), p. 250.