Udo Zembok was born in 1951 in Braunschweig, Germany.
From 1972 to 1976 he studied graphic arts and painting in Braunschweig and
Bonn, soon afterwards concentrating solely on working with glass, attracted by
the resonant qualities of light and the way it metamorphoses in glass, the only
material capable of showing the full depth of colour:
"While a student I discovered transparent colour, the colour of watercolours
that gives the illusion of being light. By 'tearing up the opaque screen',
in other words the artist's canvas, and replacing it with glass,
my search for the transparency oflight and colour took shape naturally."
After living in Amsterdam for two years, he moved to France in 1978, first
to Saint-Menoux near Moulins and then settling in Alsace in 1991.
He met Pascale Zembok in 1998. Today they live in Niedermorschwihr near
Colmar, where together they conceive the artistic concepts used in their
public-art projects.
Author of a large number of works commissioned for public and privately owned
religious and civil buildings in the Netherlands, Great Britain, the United States,
Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Germany and France, he has developed and applied
new techniques from industry that use very large sheets of coloured glass using pigments, fused together and thermoformed in large kilns.
He explores the possibilities opened up by these innovative techniques that
aim to redefine the relationship that stained-glass art has with architecture by
making it possible to produce large monolithic windows that do not require
a lead structure.
He uses these techniques to create walls that continue to play with the light in
different ways, always trying to create a large area, a wall where the language of colour can express itself to the full, making the
conventional term stained-glass window inappropriate.
INTRODUCTION