Over the past year, too, we have searched high and low in the German and international glass scene for exciting glass art to enrich the Ernsting Foundation’s collection. Our trips to exhibitions, fairs, galleries and artists’ studios were a great success, as the glass art we found there was bursting with creativity and professionalism. We were shown a colorful and broad palette of diverse works, from polychrome to purist, from fragile to compact, from refreshingly whimsical to socially critical, from vivid storytelling to serene aesthetics.

Among these gems, we discovered two award-winning bodies of work: At the renowned Galerie Handwerk in Munich, we were introduced to the work of, among others, the very young, extremely talented Anna Martinková from the Czech Republic. She was born in Prague in 2001 and is currently still studying at the Academy of Art, Architecture and Design in that city. We are clearly not the only ones impressed by the clear yet extraordinary geometry of her design language, as she was recently awarded the highly regarded “Czech International Student Design 2023 – Outstanding Student Design Award” for her work “Holy Water Font.” It is made of cast, precisely cut and polished glass and depicts a holy water font, as the title suggests, but its shape is atypical, reflecting the unusual floor plan of the Baroque Gothic chapel of St. Peter. Anne in the Czech town of Panenské Břežany. Anna Martinková here not only pays homage to the idiosyncratic architecture of Bohemian Baroque Gothic, but also deftly walks the line between visual and applied art.