Glass carried from a landscape
Johan Pertl was born and raised in Vysočina, a landscape shaped by generations of glassmakers before him — the material was never a discovery so much as an inheritance, something already running through the ground he grew up on.
Between 2015 and 2018 he studied at the Czech Technical University while working alongside DECHEM studio, before entering the Glass Studio at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, where he graduated in 2022. He is currently pursuing his doctoral studies there.
That landscape never really leaves his work. Johan is drawn to the natural and social mechanisms that quietly shape us — the slow pressure of erosion, the pull of gravity, the way a place wears down or builds up over time — and he takes them apart piece by piece, searching for a way to carry them into glass. Beyond the collections he makes for collectors, his focus lies primarily in site-specific projects: sculptures and objects conceived for one particular place, whether a private interior or an open exterior. The work never starts with the material. It starts with the site itself — its architecture, its light, the atmosphere that already lives there before he arrives. What he makes afterward doesn't try to dominate that space. It settles into it, the way a landscape settles around whatever stands in it, until the piece and its surroundings are hard to tell apart.
