In the second half of the twentieth century, and with increasing intensity in its final third, the dismantling of classical ideals and the loosening of established artistic systems accelerated: categories of artistic branches, genres, and forms disintegrated and intertwined, new forms emerged, and new materials and previously unknown techniques appeared with unprecedented variety. Alongside the renewal and transformation of painting, sculpture, and graphic art, developments in the fields traditionally labeled ‘applied arts’ were of particular importance: in addition to textile and ceramic art, glass art also stepped beyond narrow functional boundaries. Striving for individuality and autonomous expression, with a determined intent to articulate intellectual content, it increasingly addressed issues of the exploration of form and undertook the conquest of space. What had once erupted as explosive new aspirations in the 1980s and 1990s, have since become a natural part of the artistic landscape at the turn of the millennium and in our own time: and the works of art, which are new in spirit and new in form, have become fundamental building blocks of major oeuvres once categorized as applied arts, both in international art world and in Hungary. Zoltán Bohus, a sculptor and glass artist, has been an active participant in these processes from the mid-1960s to the present day, playing a decisive role, and has been a prominent figure in both domestic and international art forums, receiving numerous domestic and international awards and honours.
Owing to the strong industrial constraints, as well as the difficulties and high costs of equipping and maintaining workshops, Hungarian glass art – compared with other fields of applied arts such as ceramics and textile art – responded somewhat belatedly to the challenges of the era. Building on the artisanal traditions of earlier centuries, the conditions for the emergence of modern Hungarian glass art were created, alongside shifts in artistic outlook and indeed stimulating them, by the establishment of art education in Budapest, first at the secondary level in the 1950s and then at the higher level in the 1960s.
In initiating these processes, a decisive role was played by Bohus Zoltán’s teacher, the visual artist Z. Gács György. Later – parallel with the gradual closure of Hungary’s glass factories – the ‘studio glass’ movement also took root in Hungary, a movement that revolutionized modern glass art on an international scale. Bohus Zoltán became a key figure both in university-level glass art education and in the Hungarian studio glass movement, which had broken away from industrial production. Thanks partly to his work – together with that of his university workshop – sending successive generations on their way, and to his teaching activity from 1966 at the Budapest College of Applied Arts and later at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, contemporary Hungarian glass art now consists of multiple generations working side by side: overlapping with one another’s aspirations or diverging from them, grounded in shared or differing traditions, pursuing common or distinct ideals, and drawn to parallel or contrasting artistic currents. The picture is further complicated by the presence of strong, distinctive, yet solitary creative personalities (alongside Bohus himself, figures such as György Buczkó, Endre Gaál, Gábor Gonzales, Mária Lugossy, among others), by masters who founded schools of followers, and by smaller creative groups and generational collectives united by affinity to particular stylistic schools and ideals. Meanwhile, somewhat overshadowed by these increasingly prominent developments are both the makers of functional glass objects and, after a hiatus of several decades, the revived field of so-called architectural glass, with large-scale stained-glass compositions realized in public and private buildings. Overall, however, contemporary Hungarian glass art is characterized above all by the dominance of autonomous glass objects as sculptures – works that unfold their plastic force, exploiting the extraordinary physical properties, aesthetic uniqueness, and optical possibilities of glass – of which Bohus Zoltán is the seminal master. Alongside works executed with virtuoso technical command using traditional procedures, there are also numerous compositions employing individual, previously untried solutions. As a result, only a rough outline can be drawn of the categorical system of contemporary Hungarian glass art, which may be indicated by the groupings of cold-worked cut glass, hot-worked furnace glass, leaded flat glass, cast, and slumped sculptural glass compositions. Within this spectrum, it may be said that throughout his career Bohus Zoltán has consistently created compositions from industrially produced sheet glass, transformed by cold-working: layering, bonding, cutting, acid-etching, and polishing – and continues to do so to this day.
‘I have been working with glass for a long time because I believe that phenomena such as space and time – which are often thought to be inexpressible through sculptural means – can in fact be approached with this extraordinary material. These ideas absorbed me for years. For some time now, however, light itself has represented the true challenge for me. Is it possible, and if so how, to capture in a sculpture such an immaterial phenomenon? I am attempting to do so.’ – wrote glass artist Zoltán Bohus in his 2009 book surveying his oeuvre, in what may be regarded as a self-confession encapsulating the essence of his creative aspirations.
The Bohus glass sculptures – reduced fundamentally to geometric basic forms, composed of volumes enclosed by curving mantles that evoke spirals and emphasized by edge-arcs – take shape through optical effects, through the play of light that surrounds and penetrates them, in the flickering interplay of physical certainties and illusions, appearances and semblances. In these glass works, wrought with extraordinary meticulousness and precision, the supposedly exact and reliable experiences of perception coexist, gently confront, and imperceptibly interlock transcendence induced by transparency, imbued with uncertainties and mysteries.
At the beginning of his career, Zoltán Bohus worked with reliefs fashioned from various metals and with enamel, and he was also engaged by the sculptural possibilities of stainless steel and by medal art. During this early creative period, several of his metal designs were realized in monumental form: among them the relief for the MÁV Ticket Office on Nagymező Street in Budapest (1974), and the architectural sculpture created jointly with Tibor Csiky for the Telephone Exchange building on Szervita Square (1976). Yet even then, his first glass compositions appeared, presented at the inaugural exhibitions of Hungarian glass sculpture alongside the works of Tibor Vilt and Erzsébet Schaár.
From the outset, his works – shaped by an essentially sculptural vision – have been characterized by an abstract language, geometric character, and constructive spirit. They became permanent participants in Hungarian fine and applied art exhibitions abroad, later receiving invitations to the world’s most important European and overseas glass-art forums (Frauenau /Germany/, Glasmuseum; Detroit /USA/, Habatat Galleries; Biot /France/, Galerie Internationale du Verre, among others) – where they continue to be regularly represented today. As a result of his countless exhibition appearances and successful international showings, Bohus’s glass sculptures – documenting an almost five-decade-long creative path – have also found their place in the collections of the most significant museums of applied art worldwide, as well as in Hungary.
Robert Loeffler, a highly regarded authority on modern glass art, has said of Zoltán Bohus's work: ‘His glass sculptures, in a certain sense, ironize the principles of modernism when he shapes simple technical forms with formalist precision and thoroughness. At the same time, his pedantry recalls the precision-seeking tendency of industrial mass production. The sheet glass he uses is itself an industrial product. The irony, ultimately, lies in the fact that this precision, to the point of industrial exactness, is in Bohus’s case entirely the result of handwork. It is probably this organic touch of the hand that finally renders the cold and rigid forms poetic after all. Beyond his irony, however, Bohus also takes modernist aesthetics seriously. The emphasis is on the primacy of form, which he derives directly from the laws of the material, from the very nature of the material itself.’ Yet the most important thoughts in the interpretation of Bohus’s works were summed up by Hungarian art historian Vera Varga:
‘Passing through his gates – and he keeps opening more and more of them – we enter the subjective, lyrical medium of a transcendent world, and in the course of our glass space-time journey we perceive ever more, perhaps even unravel, some of the mysteries of the symbolic layers of glass. Bohus’s sculptures are paradoxes: their conception is intellectual, their structure exact and rational, yet their effect allows us only limited access to the transcendental secrets they harbor. These objects articulate universal problems: matter and law, space and time, world and man, technology and spirit, and the often contradictory relationships among them, all expressed in the language of glass. The artistic code system is a ‘secret’, and the degree and quality of its deciphering depend upon us, the beholders, as well.’
[2015]