About our foundation

In 1966, Zoltán Bohus was one of the first in Europe to launch higher education in glass art in Hungary at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, where he trained generations of glass artists for 44 years until his retirement in 2010, which is why the profession considers him the “father of Hungarian contemporary glass art”.

He achieved his first major international success in 1979, when, in a competition to participate in the traveling exhibition “New Glass” at The Corning Museum of Glass in New York, a committee of independent international experts selected his glass sculpture entitled Spatial Spiral as the best work out of several thousand works, which the museum purchased for its own collection. This was the defining moment in art history when contemporary Hungarian glass art entered the international forefront, and from then on, invitations to international exhibitions, symposiums, and workshops around the world continued. He tried to extend the achieved successes and opportunities to his most talented students, whose works he photographed with his own hands and sent to inviting galleries, museums and art collectors, through which he tried to provide the entire Hungarian contemporary glass art with an international presence, recognition, success and art purchase. He regularly taught at the Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle, the Glasmuseum Frauenau in Germany, Novy Bor in the Czech Republic, Sars-Poteries in France, Japan, Spain, Portugal and Great Britain. His works enrich the most prestigious private and public collections in the world. He received numerous international and Hungarian major awards and honors until his death in 2017.

Mária Lugossy graduated as a goldsmith, and right at the beginning of her career, after graduating from university, she received significant commissions for the execution of public clock sculptures, typically made of chrome steel, and building facade artworks, mainly in Budapest. She met Zoltán Bohus at university, they married in 1970, and then worked side by side in their joint studio. Lugossy’s attention soon turned to the processing of metal-plexiglass and then glass, in which her husband, Zoltán Bohus, helped her with his experience as a university lecturer and mentor.

Mária Lugossy found fulfillment in her creative work as a glass sculptor. In a matter of moments, she not only learned the techniques of working with cold glass, but also created her sculptures with a bold and innovative, age-defying sculptural attitude that had never been seen before, with which she burst like a comet into the European, American and Japanese glass art elite. He was the first in the world to implement previously unimaginable material associations in his typically large-scale sculptures, such as human faces and body parts encased in glass in the form of bronze and iron castings. He sometimes built optical glass lenses into his glass sculptures, in which mercury swayed, and in the surface treatment of many of his sculptures, he used the sandblasting technique to depict soft organic surfaces and natural phenomena such as the waves of the ocean and seas. He has won a series of international glass art awards in Japan, where many of his works are in museums, but also in Europe, such as the Musée de Louvre in Paris, the MUDAC in Lausanne in Switzerland, the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf in Germany, the most important museums in America such as The Corning Museum of Glass, the Detroit Institute of Art, The British Museum in Great Britain and other collections.