The household was shared with the Roubíček family by his uncle Jan Tříska, who studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts under Otakar Španiel.

[4] He attended the reform primary school where Miloslav Disman[note 1] taught, and later studied at the Vyšehrad Real Gymnasium, where Jindřich Severa was in charge of art education.

At the age of ten, he exhibited and sold several of his drawings and was even offered a job as a graphic designer in a Prague company, where they had no idea that he was a young boy.

In Holeček's studio, Věra Lišková, Stanislav Libenský, Josef Hospodka, Felix Průša, or Miluše Kytková were his classmates.

[9] After the war, together with Stanislav Libenský and Josef Michal Hospodka, he went to northern Bohemia to substitute the displaced German glassmakers in the glass schools in Nový Bor and Kamenický Šenov and to maintain teaching.

[11] He was an inspiring teacher and a capable organizer, and therefore, less than a year after the resumption of teaching, students were able to present their results at an exhibition on the 90th anniversary of the school.

[14] In 1949–1950, René Roubíček completed his studies at the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Prague in the glass studio of Prof. Josef Kaplický with a final thesis and a state examination.

[15] René Roubíček has moved to "Umělecké sklo" (Art Glass) national enterprise in Nový Bor, where he was the chief artist until 1965 and designed applied and decorative glassware for mass production.

[22] In 1966, he left his position at Borské sklo when the company was unable to ensure the production of modern designs created in the studios.

[49][50] Miroslav Klivar describes Roubíček's sculptures as mythical surrealism and sees in them primordial images of psychic-lyrical-poetic visions of natural objects or transparent, mysterious forms of exuberance.

He dramatically changed the perception of contemporary glass by this object, showed its artistic possibilities and was awarded the Grand Prix.

[54] Together with Stanislav Libenský and Jan Kotík, he was most credited for overcoming the notion of the servility of glass and of the imaginary border between applied and free art.

"[58][59] He thus created, for example, glass columns with a fountain for the São Paulo Art Biennial (1966),[11] later exhibited in Venice, Liège and at Expo 67 in Montreal (together with Jan Kotík).

As early as 1959, the later founders of the American Studio Glass Movement became familiar with Roubíček's works, and the Montreal exhibition also influenced Dale Chihuly.

[15] Roubíček assembled the spatial composition Cloud, Water and Fountain of Life for Expo 70 in Osaka from bent glass rods on a metal core.

[60] As an artist of the "Borské sklo" company, René Roubíček also designed some stained glass windows in the 1960s (Wall for the ceremonial hall in Ostrava, 1966, produced by the "Vitráže" factory, Nový Bor).

[65] His composition Cloud was judged by the communist regime (also in the context of other works by Stanislav Libenský, Jaroslava Brychtová, Vladimír Janoušek or Čestmír Kafka, who somehow reacted to the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia with the common theme "The Fate of Small Nations")[66] as ideologically subversive (the sculpture was spontaneously renamed The Cloud of Bolshevism Descending Over Europe)[67] and his domestic commissions were cancelled for several years.

[60][8] The composition entitled Homage to Nicolaus Copernicus[68] (for 500th Anniversary of his birth, spatial object made of hand-shaped crystal rods on a metal structure, 500 x 400 cm, UPM 1973) he originally created for Poland, but after 1970, as a banned author, he was no longer allowed to export the object[44] and it ended up in the depository of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague in Brandýs nad Labem.

[71] René Roubíček did not design only chandeliers, but the opportunity to create works other than lighting fixtures out of glass was given to him especially by foreign architects.

[31] Glass figures were often created from a semi-finished pieces blown to wooden form (Crowd) and then subsequently reworked as sculptures.

Here, the anonymity of the human form and the sparing use of colour enhance the overall effect based on causal associations and crowd psychology.

[51] In 1990, Roubíček presented a series of columns made of milky white tubes enlivened with spots, dots and strands of coloured glass fused into the surface of the column (Don't Worry, Be Happy, We're Returning to Europe) at the exhibition New Glass in Europe, 50 Artists - 50 Concepts in Düsseldorf as the first work created in the free era.

[76] His free cycle Cylinders-Non-Cylinders includes a series of incised and cut cylindrical objects, varied in colour and unexpected shape.

[24] In 2004, he returned to monumental work and created a set of ten three-metre high figures in metal and glass entitled Carnival in Venice,[81] exhibited at the Biennale and then at the request of Meda Mládková at the Kampa Museum.

It was exhibited at Design Days in Dubai[84] and at Expo 2015 in Milan[85][86] and an almost similar replica was acquired by the Museum of Glass and Costume Jewellery in Jablonec nad Nisou.

In 2005, he created an original replica of his object from the Expo 58 for the exhibition of the Modern Art collection of the National Gallery in Prague in the Trade Fair Palace.

[24] René Roubíček's pioneering work is inextricably linked to the worldwide emancipation of glassmaking in the sphere of free art.

This philosophical approach to his own work is similar to jazz music and gives glass a privileged position in the context of modern world art.