Lechner, born in Munich, has been working with slumped and fused glass since before many current practitioners were born.
He studied painting for three years in Kassel under Fritz Winter, sculpture and painting under Joseph Lacasse in Paris and Tournai for several more years, and in the mid sixties he spent three years doing specialized studies in glassmaking, both artistic and industrial.
With such an extensive background of research and intellectual development it is not surprising that he has been a pioneer from the beginning, always pushing the medium to perform beyond its previously accepted boundaries.
An early major commision was in 1973 the St.Canisius church in Freiburg/Breisgau (Ger). Therefore he made thick, rugged, textured glass panels with enamelled colour and got the Munich Exempla-Prize in 1977. His first big hanging glass sculpture (height 6 m) was installed in Regensburg (Ger) in 1974. This great glass chandelier, made of 32 fused and slumped elements (2000/600/20mm), was at the time the largest thing of its kind ever installed.
In 1982 he built up a huge octagonal glass fountain in Munich, over 2 metres wide and nearly 7 m tall, made up of three layers of slumped and fused glass that was laminated and drilled and used a spezial technology devised by Lechner, tested by the Fraunhofer Institute and patented some years later.
Lechners work has mainly been about form and texture, with colour being an added ingredient. But more recently, as shown in his glass mobile in Wunsiedel (Ger), he has been exploring the use of colour as central part of his art.
(Andrew Moore: "Glass in Architecture", London, 2005)
Florian Lechner works with the reflective and mediating qualities of glass to create powerful architectural spaces, sculptures and installations. This dynamic work celebrates the space where light and sound meet, moving beyond traditional boundaries of the present and the absent, the eye and the ear, the I and the other.
(Shelley James, Sunderland GB, 2006)
