Andrij Bokotej. Art glass exhibition

It was the constant desire to search for the new, in such an ancient branch of art as art glass, that almost immediately determined the artist’s creative originality.

Of great importance to him was the experience of Lviv’s master glass-blowers and the historical experience of Ukrainian and European art glass in general.

The artist consciously went through all the basic stages of glassmaking, mastered various techniques for its preparation and creative processing, but in fact his talent developed in the process of overcoming the limits of utilitarianism by Ukrainian decorative art, in which art glass remained for a long time.

One experimental exhibition in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in the early 1980s, titled “Glass. Character. Space.” It was then that the terms “easel” and “figure-forming” glass, unusual in terminological parlance (to be honest, quite novel nowadays), were first proposed for Andriy Bokotei’s compositions. The transparent glass spheres he exhibited (they were also called “minicosmic spaces”) were filled with inner plastic life, dynamics of movement, action and extraordinary associative activity.

It is appropriate to discuss the works of Andriy Bokotej in the context of the question of the synthesis of artistic achievements, form and content of blown glass, in which a special role is played by plasticity, light and color. The idea of dynamic light and color effect actively influences the formation of inductive properties of his compositions, in which a variety of plastic innovations unite. Among them, for example, the already mentioned forms of the glass sphere, interesting experiments in the style of glass sculpture, multi-figure compositions from the latest period of his work, in which, in addition to plastic and light-color, elements of scenography are noticeable, as well as unique (often called “Bokotej”) glass plates of associative character, with which the appearance and development of the author’s technique of plastic deformation of glass is associated.

Andriy Bokotej is a brilliant representative of the Lviv art school. In 1965 he graduated from the Lviv National Academy of Art (it was then an art institute), and since then he has been successfully engaged in art pedagogy, heading a creative studio where young people from different countries of the world are trained, appointed successively as a professor, academician – a full member of the Academy of Art of Ukraine, and since 2000 as the rector of the Lviv National Academy of Art. But among the various directions of activity, the most important for Andriy Bokotei remains creation, which is actually the main meaning of his entire life.

Prof.Igor Holod