Everyone has their own style and taste, and yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I think you’d be hard pressed to ever find anyone who was not impressed with the beauty found in the glass work of these stunning one-of-a-kind pieces by Netherlands artist Maarten Vrolijk. Maarten Vrolijk is an Amsterdam-based artist who has been creating art for over 25 years. Along with his stunning glass creations Maarten Vrolijk also creates drawings, ceramics, paintings and textiles. Many of his works has been collected and exhibited in several renowned international museums including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Groninger Museum.

To Maarten Vrolijk mind, flowers are nature's gems and have long been a recurrent inspiration in his designs: the bold tulip, the sculpted rose, the delicate lily. On occasions, Maarten Vrolijk have interpreted these in graphic designs; at other times, they have found their way into more artistic designs. What grips Maarten Vrolijk is not so much imitation of the "'real'" world. Maarten Vrolijk on a quest for the fresh image, the place where fascination becomes something visible and the design gains more worth from adding something to what already exists.

Maarten Vrolijk believes that art should make people’s everyday lives more beautiful through the many little details that evoke the unexpected. While strongly influenced by the natural world, Vrolijk is not on a quest to expose an imitation of the“real” world, but rather, is on an exploration of the simple, unequivocal, and often overlooked aspects: color, form, delicacy, strength, transparency, ephemerality, that provide a map to the fascinations we gravitate to when experiencing the world around us.

Vrolijk is perhaps best known for glass vessels with their outgrowth of colored glass fragments. The volatility in accomplishing the exceptional thickness of his glass vases creates a risky balance between strength and delicacy. The thermal stress caused when trying to equalize the interior and exterior temperature of the cooling vessels, is fraught with the propensity for breakage. The success of Vrolijk’s glass pieces lie in the crystalline clarity posed against their substantial physical impact. His exaggerated ceramic vessels have vivid vitality as works of art.