Ladislav Oliva

After graduating from university, he became an artist at the technical and artistic centre of Borské sklo in Nový Bor (1957 – 1964). He preferentially designed sandblasted and polished lead glass, but from 1958 he also dedicated himself to glass sculpture. He initially cooperated with the Bohemia glassworks externally, but he later moved to Poděbrady and remained there until 1969. The very first vases and plates which were created there according to his designs won awards in competitions for the product of the year. In the middle of the 1960s, he was experienced in almost all of the hot and cold worked techniques used in production and he also tried cooperating with architects. At that time, he was working at the glass school in Kamenický Šenov and from the end of the 1970s he was a teacher-artist at the Applied Art Glass Secondary School in Železný Brod where he developed the artistic concept of polished glass with his students over the next twenty years. At the same time, he also attended glass symposiums and cooperated with the Institute of Residential culture in Prague, the Utility Glass research Institute, Crystalex in Nový Bor and Železnobrodské sklo. Twenty years ago, he began to focus on glass sculpture, which he had first come across in the middle of the 1950s and which he tried to find a way into up to the 1990s. He creates idiosyncratic works which cannot be mistaken for those of any other artist.