Jiří Krejčiřík. Solitaire

Designer Jiří Krejčiřík qualified three times for the final three-way showdown of the Cen Czech Grand Design competition, and this year he not only received the Designer of the Year 2025 award and the Minister of Culture's Prize, but also the highest title, Grand Designer 2025. The next “grand designer exhibition” in the skylight of the Uměleckoprůmyslové muzeum will therefore be dedicated to his creativity.

Jiří Krejčiřík has chosen a wholly distinctive, bold creative position, noble and self-assured. He has refined his sophisticated eclectic stylistic language, full of references, quotations and new forms. He relies on detail, balance of forms, craft precision and intoxicatingly attractive colour. These are the ingredients from which he virtuosically composes his works, which come into being under the hands of top craftsmen.

He lets himself be bound neither by trends nor by the limits of serial production or the market. Krejčiřík's furniture designs belong to the realm of collectible design, which carries a useful function, but whose pronounced aestheticism, in the vein of the complex gesamtkunstwerk, pushes it closer to the category of art. Authors with a similar scope and approach could be counted on one hand on the Czech scene. Unlike visually exuberant and decorative furniture referencing various sources of inspiration, such as Italian postmodernism, ancient Greek art, European Art Nouveau, the work of František Bílek, Joža Plečnik and Josef Hoffmann, or historical and folk furniture, Krejčiřík's lighting designs are more subtle and formally more restrained. All the more does the author's uncompromising sense of composition, detail and sophisticated balance of forms stand out in them, elevating the functional object to the level of Calder's luminous mobiles or light objects. In his recent lamp designs, however, Jiří Krejčiřík has shown that he is a universal designer who can tame his rich individualistic style in the service of a brand without betraying it.

And what can we look forward to in the skylight? These will be novelties created uniquely for this space and this occasion. The works will be unveiled to the public in an unusual installation on 19 February 2027.