A limited edition crown paperweight from one of the best millefiori artists from Poland
Measures 3 1/4 inches in diameter and 2 3/4 inches in height
Coming directly from the artist - excellent condition
Tomasz Gondek was born in 1967. He lives and works in Szklarska Poręba, in the immediate vicinity of the famous, no longer operating crystal glass factory, the so-called Josephine (Josephinenhütte) founded in 1842. The artist comes from a family with glass-making traditions. His father, Bronisław Gondek, was a steel worker and a glass master who, since 1956, realized glass projects by famous artists from Poland and abroad. Tomasz Gondek was fascinated with glass and the art of its production from an early age. After graduating from primary school, against his father's will, he attended the School of Artistic Crafts in Cieplice to a class in the field of decorator and then glassworker. He started working in the crystal glass factory "Julia" (former "Józefina") in Szklarska Poręba. He did not stop at blowing and pressing glassware. Remembering the broken, shimmering with all the colors of the rainbow nineteenth-century glassware, decorated with elaborate techniques of filigree and millefiori, once found in the old dumps near "Józefina", he decided to reactivate this technique. The technology of millefiori production, as one of the most effective, requires the highest skills and still hides many puzzles. The production of millefiori glasses was perfected in the nineteenth century by masters from a few glassworks with the highest level of production, among others in Venice. After more than five years of studies on this old technology, in which he was substantively assisted by the glass department of the Karkonosze Museum in Jelenia Góra, headed at the time by Dr. Stefania Żelasko, Tomasz Gondek was the only one in Poland who successfully started to produce glass and paperweights in the millefiori technique. The culmination of his experiments was an exhibition of about sixty glass paperweights made with the millefiori technique, which took place in the Karkonosze Museum in Jelenia Góra in mid-2007. He carries out his artistic works in his own studio in Szklarska Poręba.
