Curriculum vitae

Pavel Kopřiva is a multimedia and glass artist. He lives in Kamenický Šenov, Czechia.

He trained as a jeweller at the Secondary School of Applied Arts in Jablonec nad Nisou, then studied glass under Jiří Harcuba and intermedia under Adéla Matasová at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (UMPRUM) in Prague. He also went through the Pilchuck Glass School in the United States. He has taught at the Corning Glass Studio in the USA and in Marinha Grande, Portugal, and ran courses with his wife Karolína at Bild-Werk Frauenau in Germany. Since 2007 he has headed the Interactive Media studio at the Faculty of Art and Design, J. E. Purkyně University; from 2014 to 2026 he led the glass school in Kamenický Šenov.

He works with objects and installations, and alongside them with photography and video. The common denominator is a conceptual approach: the starting point is not the material or the shape but the question the work is meant to ask. Technology and design interest him as methods that can be carried into an art context and set to work against their own brief.

Most of the work starts from a system people habitually trust: science, engineering, an official report, a shape that looks expensive and considered. Kopřiva takes such a system apart, plants a fault in it and hands it back. The viewer is left facing something that behaves entirely matter-of-factly and yet does not add up. That moment of hesitation is the work itself; the object only carries it.

Where the distrust comes from is legible in the place he was born. North Bohemia broken by open-cast mining, and a society just out of totalitarian rule, taught him to read every smooth façade as something with a reverse side. He comments on social phenomena and events with an ironic distance, without moralising and without claiming the last word.

In craft terms the work rests on joining techniques that do not belong together: flat glass with electronics, glass with new media, do-it-yourself practice with laboratory research. He works with nanofibres and with computer-controlled light combined with mirrors; a favourite method is glass metallised with silver or titanium. Military technology and ufology are lasting interests, both as systems that claim more than they can carry.

The objects tend to be perfectly made and look beautiful. That is exactly why it is hard to say whether what stands in front of the viewer is an instrument, a piece of design, or an information trap. It asks where the information comes from and whether it is true. He leaves the question open on purpose.