Václav Šerák

In the early 1960s, Václav Šerák began to collaborate with porcelain manufacturers as a designer. He familiarized himself in detail with this field as an apprentice at a plant in Merklín that manufactured high-voltage circuit breakers. Throughout his life, he has been interested in technical aspects of the making of silicate materials, and thanks to his thorough knowledge about them and his experiments with materials and shapes, he has come up with innovations that he has applied working in the studio and in his original designs. He has also applied his original, monumental, and expressive style to works incorporated into architecture since the early 1990s in collaboration with the architect Bohumil Chalupníček, and somewhat nontraditionally in snow and ice sculptures together with Jiří Laštovička and Petr Říha. In 1966, he founded the International Symposium of Ceramics in Bechyně together with Lubor Těhník, Pravoslav Rada, and Bohumil Dobiáš, Jr. It is the longest continually existing symposium on the European continent.

In 1990 Václav Šerák became the leader of the Studio of Ceramics and Porcelain at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, where he was appointed to a professorship in 1992. In the atmosphere following the revolution, he introduced students to developments in ceramic sculpture and design from the recent past beyond the borders of Czechoslovakia. Šerák’s pupils now have great influence over Czech design, and it is no coincidence that the academy and university studios in Bohemia and Slovakia working with ceramics are lead by Daniel Piršč, Antonín Tomášek, Gabrilel Vach a Maxim Velčovský. http://www.upm.cz/index.php?language=en&page=123&year=2014&id=240&img=1556

http://en.artceramics.cz/members/serak-vaclav