Josef Marek is the 3-Dimensional Artist Spotlight winning artist for the month of December 2017. He is a sculptor based in the Czech Republic/Cyprus. Josef’s work involves remelting glass in moulds, cutting, polishing and often combining glass with stone and other natural materials, such as basalt, stainless steel and copper. He also experiments with other glass techniques such as structural etching, glue-chipping or tarnishing.

Josef’s Solo Art Exhibition will be featured on the website for the month of December 2017. The gallery will promote Josef and his work on the Fusion Art website, individual online press releases to hundreds of outlets, email blasts, in online event calendars, art news websites and through the gallery’s extensive social media outlets.  Fusion Art’s objective is to promote the Artist Spotlight winning artists, worldwide, to art professionals, gallerists, collectors and buyers.

Please read Josef’s Biography and Artist Statement below as he describes his inspiration and process in his own words. Scroll to the bottom of the page to see his exhibition.

If you are interested in purchasing any of these award-winning pieces, or to see more of Josef’s work, please visit his website.

Also, please visit Fusion Art’s YouTube Channel to see Josef’s Solo Art Exhibition Video.

Thank you to all the artists who participated in the Artist Spotlight competition and congratulations to Marlene and the other Artist Spotlight winning artists.

Josef Marek Biography

Josef Marek is a glass sculptor based in the Czech Republic/Cyprus. His work involves remelting glass in moulds, cutting, polishing and often combining glass with stone and other natural materials, such as basalt, stainless steel and copper. He also experiments with other glass techniques such as structural etching, glue chipping or tarnishing.

From the moment he stepped onto the art scene, Josef has participated in many group exhibitions in Europe and overseas. He had seven solo exhibitions in Toyama, Japan as well as exhibitions in Paris, Frýdek CR, Malmö, The Hague, Leerdam and Hamburg. He studied at the Secondary School of Applied Glass Art in Kamenicky Senov (1978-1982). After graduating, Josef became a glass cuter in Crystalex. He also worked as a teacher in the Technical School of Glassmaking in Kamenicky Senov (1986-1989). He was subsequently accepted at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague. For two years he studied under Professor Vladimír Kopecký (1990-1992), and then under Professor Marian Karel. After graduating, Josef worked as a visiting professor for glass cold processes at the Toyama Institute of Glass Art.

Since returning to the Czech Republic Josef has created more compelling and visually stimulating works influenced by his time in Japan. He often combines glass with natural materials (often with basalt, stainless steel and copper) as illusionary space consisting of transparent and opaque mass and maximum contrasts are impressive and convincing. However, his work is dominated by sculptures made out of glass. He seeks maximum simplicity, but enriches it with details on the surface and inside the mass. Josef prefers crystal glass with sealed plastic. He also likes to use colored glass due to its ability to create the illusion of the depth. This gives to his work a uniqueness, individuality and originality.

Josef Marek Artist Statement

“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”.

What Josef Marek has achieved in his visions and has materialized in his glass sculptures is certainly extraordinary. 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.

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, nonverbal 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 splendor and with convincing power, aided by Marek distinctively clear sculptural visualization , 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.

*methexis (μέθεξις as written in Greek) means wide awake conscious ( or even super conscious) participation, assimilation, corroboration and ontological union, in the most profound, deep, meaningful and holistic non-fragmentary way.

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