Oldřich Plíva

* 1946

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  • "Let's say the thing that won the Bavarian State Prize came about because I saw a little pear, or rather a plum of glass, in the glassworks. When I saw it, I understood that it was the 'big glass sculpture'. I had it scanned with a spatial scanner, enlarged by computer, made a model on a milling machine, so it's actually exactly the enlarged object that I picked up from the ground there in the glassworks."

  • "Once, Dr. Wiercigroch, a sensible gentleman, told me in his office that my travel reports should look different. I wrote everything down for them—when I arrived, settled in, packed, unpacked, and left. But I never named anyone, never commented on anything, and they didn’t like that. He read to me a rather denunciatory report as an example of how it should be done. It actually stated that so-and-so was present, that the person in question didn’t have a positive attitude toward the socialist establishment, was slandering someone, and so on. It was written in a very harsh, ugly way. I told him that I was not an employee of the Art Center, but an artist. He calmly replied, ‘This report was written by an artist.’ That’s what struck me. But apparently, there are—or were—such people."

  • "I was in Českomoravská vysočina with my then-girlfriend on 21 August 1968. When we heard the news on the radio that morning, we hitchhiked to Prague, we were at the radio station that day, we saw everything first hand, from the centre of the action. We spent the night in the dormitories at Strahov. From the roof of the dormitory we could see light bullets flying and hear the clatter of guns. It was clear. Something happened there that should not have happened."

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    Liberec, 17.04.2023

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He looked down on occupied Prague from the roof of Strahov. Below, he heard gunfire

Oldrich Plíva, 1964
Oldrich Plíva, 1964
photo: archive of a witness

Oldřich Plíva was born on 4 June 1946 in Mšeno nad Nisou. His father Oldřich worked in a photographic studio in Jablonec nad Nisou, his mother Julie, née Ullwerová, was a babysitter for children, later she worked in his father’s photo studio. He had an older brother Petr. After primary school, he entered the Secondary School of Glass Arts in Železný Brod and after graduating he entered the Atelier of Glass Sculpture at the University of Applied Arts in Prague, where he successfully completed his studies in 1971. He moved back to Jablonec nad Nisou and began working with the organisations Skloexport and Artcentrum, which enabled freelance artists to distribute their works abroad. His glass sculptures were commissioned by galleries both at home and abroad, and he also had a number of commissions for public spaces. Thanks to a working trip to an exhibition in Corning, USA in 1979, he was able to travel around part of America with several friends. In 1989, he and Zdeněk Lhotský privatized part of the Železnobrodské sklo (ŽBS) company, where he worked for a year and a half, after which he returned to the ranks of freelance artists. He was married once, he and his wife had two daughters, but they divorced. In 2023 he lived in Jablonec nad Nisou and was still actively creating, mostly working on collecting material for his own art archive. The story of the witness could be recorded thanks to the support of a grant from the Statutory City of Jablonec nad Nisou in 2023.