Miluše Roubíčková

Miluše Roubíčková (1922–2015) was a distinctive Czech glass artist who managed to transform glass into a gently ironic and at the same time deeply personal commentary on the world of the everyday. After classical grammar school she studied glass and monumental painting at Prague's UMPRUM, and already from the 1950s she was among the respected authors of drinking and utility glass – awarded, for example, at the Milan Triennale and Expo 58. From the second half of the 1960s she turned increasingly to free work, in which she used hot-shaped, often opaque and richly coloured glass. She collaborated with the glassworks in Kamenický Šenov, Nový Bor, Škrdlovice and Hergiswil, and master glassmakers were equal partners for her in realising poetic but technically demanding objects.

Her world is made of flowers on long stems, bundt cakes, cakes, fruit, cabbage heads, preserving jars, plastic bags, bags, balls of yarn and women's heads – motifs that, with gentle humour and nostalgia, return the viewer to childhood, the kitchen, the garden or the pantry. In intimate dimensions she was able to create an extraordinarily strong atmosphere, somewhere on the border between pop art and personal poetics, in which the Czech sense of exaggeration meets a sensitivity to the intimate space of the home. Together with her husband René Roubíček she belongs among the legends of Czech and international glass – their work, today represented in leading collections all over the world, shows two different but mutually complementary forms of modern glass sculpture.