Glass lamp "Lion" ("The guard of your home") (2017) Sculpture by Rashid Bakirov

Hello, my name is Rashid Bakirov, I'm a Tartar, born in 1959 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. I am married and have three children. I have technical training in aviation mechanics, and I worked in aviation, but one day in 1997 I was in a glass factory and immediately fell in love with hot glass. This amazing moment when a hot, soft and almost formless glass is placed and blown into the mold, and after one or two minutes it gets a clear, finished shape. This process impressed me so much that I left aviation, and since then I have been engaged in glass. After the collapse of the empire (USSR), I had to emigrate from Uzbekistan to Russia, and until 2010 I lived and worked as a technologist and designer of glass sculptures at the Glass Institute in the Russian capital of art glass Gus-Crystal. There I developed my own technology for creating ceramic graphite molds for glass sculpture. After the crisis of 2008 and the closing of glass factories, I traveled from city to city to catch up with the glass artcraft that was leaving the country. In 2010, I said goodbye to this at the last factory of art glass (it disappeared) in the city of Saratov, where I now live. Although it takes a lot of effort, but now I sometimes make a glass sculpture to order.

• Nationality: RUSSIA
• Date of birth : 1959
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Russian Contemporary Artists