The BOTTLE exhibition: the story of the largest bottling plant in Austria-Hungary

The Museum of the City of Ústí nad Labem has prepared a new exhibition under the simple name BOTTLE. In addition to the various bottles as a phenomenon among the packaging, it also represents the 150-year history of the Mühlig family glassworks in Ústí. The exhibition opened to the public on March 16 and will last until the end of February 2023, so this whole year will commemorate the ongoing International Year of Glass.

The extensive exhibition is primarily based on hundreds of bottles of various colours, shapes and sizes. The collection is dominated by giant advertising bottles for fairs and hand-blown demijohns. Other exhibits show both the life of the company's founders and regular glassmakers, as well as bottle production technology.

All subjects are highlighted by the original exhibition architecture of the artist and pedagogue of the UJEP Faculty of Art and Design Jan C. Löbl, which uses glass in a variety of colours as the main material. Our Teplice glass factory AGC also collaborated on it - most of the exhibits are displayed on 120 shelves made of clear and coloured Planibel glass and Lacobel glass in new shades. All shelves were manufactured at the AGC Processing Teplice processing plant.

Although most of the exhibits are part of the collections of the Ústí museum, we were pleased that our glass factory AGC could also support the exhibition by lending a bronze bust of the factory worker Max Mühlig, the Mühlig company plaque and 70 other artifacts and photographs from our company archive.

Even the curator Jakub Doležel himself does not know how many bottles, BOTTLES and demijohns there are, but he hopes that you will visit the exhibition and perhaps count the bottles.

The exhibition takes place in the main building of the Ústí nad Labem City Museum (www.muzeumusti.cz), Masarykova 1000, 400 01 Ústí nad Labem, open to the public from March 16 to February 28, 2023.