Red Pyramid

The artistic partnership of Stanislav Libenský (b. 1921) and Jaroslava Brychtová (b. 1924) has had an enormous influence on the Studio Glass movement. The career in glass of this husband-and-wife team spanned more than 45 years. Their art explores ideas about light, color, space, and transparency. Charcoal studies of the forms are created by Libenský and given to Brychtová, who translates her husband’s drawings into three-dimensional models. The process of conceiving each sculpture - developing the concept, envisioning the form in three dimensions, and selecting the color of the glass to be used - is shared by the artists. While much abstract art can seem cold or removed, the sculptures of Libenský and Brychtová communicate emotion and energy through color and light. In Red Pyramid, the dramatic character of the sculpture results from the penetration of light into the glass mass, a phenomenon that the artists explored repeatedly in their work. Glass is a material that is often used symbolically. It lends itself to metaphor because it can imitate some things, such as water and stone, and suggest other things, such as air and light. One of the most powerful aspects of glass is its ability to hold light in its mass in a way similar to that in which energy, or the spirit, is held in the mass of the human body. Red Pyramid was presented to The Corning Museum of Glass at the time of the artists’ retrospective exhibition in 1994.