Anna Matoušková

Anna Matoušková is a part of what author Sylvia Petrová terms the “angry generation” of students of the glass studio at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague, those of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s who had seen the light of freedom and sought to pursue the interdisciplinary activities and artistic choices that enriched the heritage of their seniors. She studied under three different professors at a time when the Communist Party sought to exert increasing control over artistic education: Stanislav Libenský, whose politically-engineered departure led to the tenure of Jaroslav Svoboda, who was succeeded by Vladimir Kopecký, her father. It would seem that the disruptions only strengthened her resolve and focus.

Her philosophical approach is couched in compelling, cast dimensional forms that are both seductive in their beauty and provocative as distillations of a conceptual, structural aesthetic. Anna refers to her glass objects as architecture. For her glass does not delimit space. Rather it is space. Her fascination with the fundamentals of aesthetics is both deeply philosophical and elegantly pure: a vocabulary of geometry – ovals, circles, cubes – enriched by the kinetic play of light that draws the viewer into her spaces.