Interview with David Valner | The Poetry of Glassmaking

About David Valner

David Valner, founder of Valner Studio, brings a multidisciplinary background in glass, sculpture, fine arts, and interactive media. His work explores the tension between mass production and the poetry of the everyday, with glass design emerging as his primary medium in recent years.
Raised amid the glow of his family’s glassmaking tradition, Valner absorbed the artistry and ritual of the craft from an early age. Today, he honors glass as a living, fluid material—embracing natural imperfections as hallmarks of authenticity and celebrating each piece as a singular testament to the artistry of handmade over the sterile uniformity of mass production.

We met him at EDIT Napoli this year, where he showcased his Fungus and Parassitica collection, inspired by the organic structures of fungi and mycelium, which transforms glass into unusual, almost living forms. The artistic touch, colored glass that pours onto the surface, gives the final pieces a unique, bold accent.

Parasitica by David Valner. Photography and video:Tereza Valnerová
Website: https://terezavalner.com/Instagram: @tereza.valner
© David Valner Studio
Website: www.valner.cz – Instagram: @valner.studio

Encountering Valner at EDIT Napoli revealed the intriguing interplay of technical mastery, creative freedom, and personal history in his work. He leaves us pondering: at what point does utility transcend into art?

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Hello David! We know you come from a glassmaking heritage, and today David Valner is a collective working at the edge of art and design. We want to learn more about the shift from a family-oriented business to a more recognizable design firm. Was this a desire born of your own initiative?

My father, a craftsman and artist himself, founded what was then a relatively small family glassmaking studio. With his team, he focused on exceptional craftsmanship and high-quality glass production, a tradition I continue to build on today. The studio developed its own collections while later gradually establishing itself as a highly skilled production partner for other designers and creative studios. This remains an important part of what we do today, as we continue to collaborate with internationally recognized figures in design and art, helping them bring their ideas to life through glass. I inherited this foundation through my father’s work.

However, my own artistic background took a rather different direction. Instead of studying glass, I studied fine art, focusing on sculpture, objects, interactive installations, and video art. During my studies and the early years of my career, my work had very little to do with glass. Around 2017, I began bringing these two worlds together through David Valner Studio. Since then, I have gradually developed my own artistic language and built the studio into what it is today.

Photography and video:
Tereza Valnerová
Website: https://terezavalner.com/
Instagram: @tereza.valner
© David Valner Studio
Website: www.valner.cz
Instagram: @valner.studio

When you begin working on a piece, do you start with a specific function in mind, or do you allow the material to take shape autonomously—leaving it to the end user to determine its placement and function within their own space?

My studio is primarily design-oriented, and functionality is just as important to me as the conceptual and aesthetic aspects of my work. However, my creative process usually begins with exploring the material itself right after an idea comes to mind. Together with the team, we experiment with different techniques to understand their possibilities and limitations. This exploration often takes place through vases, which offer a great deal of freedom. It is a very open and intuitive process for me, the glassmakers, and even the material itself. Once I understand how a particular technique or principle works, I begin developing it into more complex objects, such as tables, lighting, or, more recently, candleholders. At that stage, functionality becomes an essential part of the design process from the very beginning.

To push back against mass production, you embrace the defect as a form of respect for the material as a free, fluid entity. How does this show up in your work process, and how do you know when a piece is complete?

I genuinely celebrate every imperfection, every variation in shape. To me, this is the very essence of craftsmanship. It’s not that I couldn’t design and produce more precise or standardized objects, but in my approach, something essential would be lost, and I would probably lose interest in the process.
My creative process always begins with an idea, concept, or story I want to capture and interpret through a collection. This is how I am used to working. Only then do I begin searching for the right form, mainly through experimentation.

Glassblowing is essentially a 2,000-year-old craft, and in many ways, it is already a perfect technique. I try to look at it from a different perspective, sometimes combining techniques in rather unconventional, even slightly rebellious ways. As for knowing when an object is finished, that comes down to intuition. I don’t follow any fixed rules or predefined standards. It’s more about sensing when the piece has reached the point where it feels complete to me.

The way the colored glass blends on the vases in your Parassitica collection clearly reflects your sensitivity to color. Does this use of tints happen spontaneously, or do you plan your palette and application from the beginning?

My use of such bold colors and their combinations grows directly out of the concepts behind each collection. In recent years, I have been interpreting, among other things, the worlds of fungi and mould. It is an incredibly rich and colorful universe, especially when viewed under a microscope, and this principle forms an important foundation for collections such as Fungus and Parasitica. The color combinations themselves are intuitive. I never really had to stop myself from using strong colors; they came naturally. Looking back now, I can see a recurring pattern. I often create a vivid yet harmonious palette, and then disrupt it with something sharper, louder, more contrasting, and seemingly out of place. The process is spontaneous, but in hindsight, this is probably a principle that runs through my work.

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View our live interview with David during Edit Napoli 2026 >

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