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Tomas Kral

Awarded

Tomas Kral

Glass collections 'Cut & Paste' and 'Upgrade'

Glassware

Jury report

The Transformation of the Preserving Jar
How does one trans­form mun­dane ma­te­r­ial like in­dus­trial glass into some­thing de­sir­able and cu­ri­ous? Lau­sanne de­signer Tomas Kral has cre­ated a se­duc­tive glass col­lec­tion using sev­eral strate­gies of en­hance­ment. In his 'Cut & Paste' se­ries, he started with con­ven­tional pre­serv­ing jars and milk bot­tles, cut­ting them apart and re­assem­bling them. In this way, he came up with new, un­ex­pect­edly sen­sual forms that do not en­tirely deny their ori­gins and yet have a se­duc­tive ap­peal that makes them quite ex­clu­sive. Kral, who also has a diploma in 'Lux­ury De­sign', thus demon­strates the po­ten­tial el­e­gance of re­cy­cled glass. The abil­ity to en­hance a banal ma­te­r­ial is fur­ther demon­strated in the tech­nique of glass cut­ting. The de­signs ap­plied to in­dus­trial glass in 'Up­grade' are con­ven­tion­ally seen only in high-qual­ity crys­tal glass. The ef­fect is as­ton­ish­ing: The or­di­nary source ma­te­r­ial has be­come beau­ti­fully se­duc­tive. Trained at the Ecole can­tonale d'art de Lau­sanne, Kral loves to ex­per­i­ment with ma­te­ri­als and boldly sub­verts the con­ven­tions of hand­crafted work. In his 'Twist' vases, for in­stance, he ex­ploits the or­ganic ap­pear­ance of ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties caused by blow­ing glass in wooden moulds. These ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties are of par­tic­u­lar in­ter­est to him, turn­ing a so-called mis­take into a prin­ci­ple of de­sign. And in de­vis­ing the shape of a de­canter, he set him­self a very spe­cial task: How can one ob­ject be used to pour both water and wine? 'Mol­e­cule', with a cham­ber for each of the two liq­uids, shows us. It is play­ful and yet func­tional. Tomas Kral's de­sign strate­gies are sur­pris­ing, hu­mor­ous and ex­u­ber­ant. It is a de­light to note that his (lux­ury) ob­jects re­tain a re­fresh­ingly or­di­nary func­tion­al­ity.
Peter Stohler

Biography

Tomas Kral
Born in
1979
Education
Industrial Designer

Web

www.tomaskral.ch

also in

2013

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