Dubai and now Pilsen. A unique crystal Venus is enthroned among the collection of cars

The Venus – Blue sculpture, by the academic sculptor and painter Vlastimil Beránek, is only a little over eighty centimeters tall, but weighs 243 kilos.

“There is no larger sculpture like this, cast in one piece and polished on the entire surface,” said Marek Landa, who represents the artist. “It was created for the world exhibition Expo 2020 in Dubai, where it was for half a year. It is exhibited here for the first time since Dubai,” he stated.

Venus has four other smaller crystal sisters in the Pilsen exhibition. Price for one? “Upper tens of millions of crowns,” Landa pointed out. “Things like this don’t come around often. And certainly no one has ever exhibited glass sculptures together with cars. It’s very interesting,” he added.

The museum also exhibits blackened subfossil trunks of ancient oaks and several artifacts made from them by Jaroslav Prošek. “It’s a Hollywood story,” said Tomáš Rothschein from the company Subfossil Oak, which is based in Ostrava. It was there that the tribes happened to be found while digging the foundations for the biogas plant.

“For a long time it was not known what it actually was. It looked unattractive, it smelled unattractive,” revealed Rothschein. “Giant pieces of blackened wood came to the surface from a depth of five to ten meters, some trees were even thirty meters long. They had to be washed, cleaned. The report we have from the American dendrological laboratory Beta Labs in Miami states that, based on radiocarbon analysis, the age of the samples is six and a half thousand years.

Subfossil wood is slightly harder than normal. “It’s seven to seventeen percent mineralized,” Rothschein continued. Some of the works that Prošek created from this material were also seen by visitors to the Dubai Expo. “We had to protect them against UV radiation. Then they stayed there, we cooperate with the royal institutions in the Emirates,” he added.

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