• Quote of the Month
• Staff Pick of the Month
• Artist of the Month: Martin Rosol
• Calendar

"Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul." - Wassily Kandinsky

Martin, like many Czech glassworkers, learned his trade in a "company school" set up to train craftsmen to execute limited edition designs for art glass manufacturers. Though the arrangement provided employment for many, it did not provide young artists with the degree required by the old regime to sell art. So, by day, Martin turned out functional art in the form of bowls and vases for the factory. At night, using scrap from the day's production, he created his own larger, more abstract pieces. Before long his sculptures were being exhibited in Europe and the United States, and in 1981, Martin was awarded the Bavarian State Prize for Glass Sculpture in Munich.

Eventually, through friends, Martin had the opportunity to come to the U.S. on a visitor's passport, to work with an established glass artist in New York State. He set up machines for the artist and worked with him in his studio, all the while perfecting his own work. Holsten Galleries in Stockbridge was among the first to sell some of his pieces during this time in the U.S. After five months his visa expired, and he had to return to Czechoslovakia permanently in the summer of 1986.

The Rosol family's journey took them from Hungary, to Yugoslavia, to Austria then to Germany, where they waited for two years to get visas to emigrate to the U.S. They signed up for English classes together at Greenfield Community College. In 1994, The Rosol family became naturalized American citizens and they now live in Massachusetts, where Martin works in his own studio.

Influenced most by architectural studies, Martin's sculptures, in the words on one admirer, are "works of elegant design and craftsmanship". Made with several pieces of glass precisely cut from blocks of crystal, the glass is constructed in architectural forms after selected surfaces have been sand-blasted.

With the new "Argonautica" series, Martin Rosol evokes the inner planetary worlds of the oceans, which have a deep psychological connection to the subconscious mind. These studies in glass reflect light in a way that recalls our deep and abiding fascination with those worlds. With simple geometric forms and thin veneers of color, light is transformed through our perception into the mystical world of our collective memory, taking us back to a time when the universe was still a daily experience of unified consciousness; before the world of technology shattered our myths and memories.

Rosol's public collections include the American Craft Museum in New York, the Kanazawa Museum in Japan and the Moravian National Gallery in the Czech Republic.

A great way to see what's happening is to access the Berkshire Visitors' Bureau website, at www.Berkshires.org.

November-December: Group glass exhibition at gallery. Featuring Dante Marioni, William Morris, Stephen Powell, Martin Rosol and other gallery artists.

Please check our website in September for more SOFA images

January 12-16, 2006: Palm Beach 3. West Palm Beach Convention Center. We will present an all new body of work by Lino Tagliapietra.

May 28-January 16, 2006: GARDENS OF GLASS, Major exhibition of Dale Chihuly at Kew Gardens, London Link is http://www.rbgkew.org.uk

Please contact the gallery for further information or to obtain catalogues.