Forms of Light
Michał Diament
exhibition
Forms of Light
Michał Diament
16.09 – 15.11.2026
Curator: Cezary Lisowski
Opening: 16.09.2026, 19:00
Free admission
The starting point was a previously unpublished archive comprising over a thousand negatives, prints, and documentary and experimental photographs, as well as several dozen surviving glass objects. The materials obtained from the artist’s family were, for the first time, subjected to review, research, and digitisation. This made it possible to reconstruct Diament’s creative path and to see how photography and glass consistently intertwined in his work.
Initially, Diament designed simple, functional tableware intended for mass production, in keeping with the ideals of modern design of the 1960s – much like many other representatives of the Wrocław school of glass. However, visits to the glass factory and his contact with the living, malleable mass of glass gradually changed his way of thinking. Glass ceased to be merely a utilitarian material. It became a sculptural medium. In the final years of his life, the artist created organic, unique objects now referred to as ‘Ghosts’, which rank among the most interesting examples of original artistic glasswork from that period.
His photography followed a similar path. From documenting the artistic life of Wrocław and taking photographs of glass for the university and other designers, Diament moved on to experiments in which the camera became a tool for transforming reality. He was interested not so much in the objects themselves as in optical phenomena – reflections, the refraction of light, transparency and the rhythm of forms.
This exhibition presents Michał Diament’s body of work in such a wide-ranging manner for the first time: from documentary photography, through optical experiments and photographs of glass, to preserved functional and artistic objects. In doing so, it brings to light from the archives the figure of an artist whose work adds an important, yet insufficiently recognised, photographic chapter to the history of the Wrocław school of glass.
The exhibition is created in partnership with the successors of Michał Diament’s work and Lisowski Gallery.
Curatorial text
Cezary Lisowski
Light reaches us after a delay. Art history, too, has its delays: the work of certain artists needs time before it can re-enter the field of vision. Michał Diament (1934–1977) was a recognised figure in Wrocław’s artistic milieu of the 1970s, yet in the decades that followed, his oeuvre largely receded from view.
In Diament’s practice, light is not only one of the central subjects but also a material in its own right. He explored it through two media: photography, from the early 1960s, and glass, from 1967, the year he graduated from the Faculty of Ceramics and Glass at the State Higher School of Visual Arts in Wrocław. A decade later, these two lines of enquiry converged. His experience of product photography, devoted primarily to documenting objects made at the school, provided the point of departure. Diament then turned his camera towards his own glass works, photographing them not as finished products, but as forms open to further transformation.
From the mid-1970s, Diament’s glass works departed decisively from the simple, functional forms of the Wrocław school of glass from which he had emerged. His practice turned towards the autonomous art object, while visits to the Laura glassworks in Tarnów yielded abstract, organic forms. His final works evoke heads or silhouettes. Diament created glass models of his own and then portrayed them.
At the same time, he began experimenting with colour photography. In the resulting series, glass beings come to life, move within the frame and change their poses. Product photography gives way to experimentation and play. Diament brings the objects closer, fragments and multiplies them, alters their scale and superimposes negatives. Vessels lose their familiar scale, their contours breaking apart in reflections. A single object becomes the source of multiple images. In photography, a form fixed as the molten glass cooled regains its plasticity.
Forms of Light is the first survey exhibition of Diament’s work, presented almost fifty years after the artist’s death. It brings together surviving glass works and documentary and experimental photographs, drawing entirely on a previously unstudied family archive. While tracing the artist’s earlier experiments in photography and glass, the exhibition focuses on the late phase of his practice, when the two media became interdependent elements of a single process.
Michał Diament (1935–1977) was a photographer, designer of functional glassware and creator of artistic glass, associated with the Wrocław art scene. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław in the studio of Professor Stanisław Dawski. He designed glass for mass production, created unique artistic forms, and worked in documentary, advertising and experimental photography. In his work, he consistently explored the relationships between light, matter and image.
Supported by
Partners
