| Zbyněk Sekal | |
| Birth Date: | 12 July 1923 |
| Birth Place: | Prague, Czechoslovakia |
| Death Place: | Vienna, Austria |
| Education: | Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague |
| Known For: | sculpture, objects, assemblage, painting, typography, translations |
| Awards: | City of Vienna Prize for Sculpture (1984) |
Zbyněk Sekal (12 July 1923 – 24 February 1998) was a Czech sculptor, painter and translator. During World War II he was imprisoned for three years in the Mauthausen concentration camp. After the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, he emigrated to Austria. Already in the mid-1960s, he was considered one of the most important and distinctive Czech sculptors.[1]
In 1934–1941 he graduated from the Real Gymnasium and the Business Academy and then worked briefly as an intern at the Topič publishing house. Before the war, he was already involved in the activities of the Comité de la democratie de España and later worked in the left-wing anti-Nazi National Movement of Working Youth.[2] At the beginning of the war, he tragically lost his father. In 1941, at the age of eighteen, he was arrested for distributing leaflets, imprisoned in Pankrác Prison in Prague, in the Small Fortress in Terezín, and for the next three years until the end of the war in Mauthausen concentration camp, where he worked for a year in a stone quarry.[3] In the concentration camp, he became close to the Polish painter Marian Bogusz, and later, as a scribe in an office, he perfected his German, from which he later translated very difficult philosophical texts.[4]
In 1945, he was accepted to study at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague in the studio of prof. František Tichý and made friends with his classmates Mikuláš Medek, Stanislav Podhrázský, Josef Lehoučka and Zdeněk Palcr. He rejoined the Spořilov Surrealist group, which had been formed by his friends of the same generation at the beginning of the war.[5] On a trip to Paris organized for students in 1947 by prof. Václav Nebeský, he visited the International Surrealism Exhibition at the Galerie Maeght several times. He was strongly impressed by the rawness of the installations with reminiscences of war and camps and the primitivizing paintings (in the Foyer de l'Art Brut) by Jean Dubuffet. He also made the acquaintance of Toyen, who was preparing paintings for an exhibition in Prague at Topič Salon. Shortly before his trip to Paris, at the age of 24, he married the painter Ludmila Purkyňová, with whom he had a son, Jan.[6]
He continued his studies at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague under prof. František Muzika and in the studio of prof. Emil Filla, but in 1950 he left the school without a diploma to avoid politicized state exams. After leaving school, he belonged to the so-called Libeň circle of Bohumil Hrabal and was the author of the generational statement " Postscript or Abdication" (1951), which was first published in samizdat as part of Hrabal's book The Tender Barbarian (Petlice edition).[7]
In 1951–1953 he was employed as a publicity officer at the General Directorate of Meat Industry and as a literary editor at the Political Literature Publishing House (later Svoboda publishing house). In the winter of 1952/1953 he completed his military service. In a futile attempt to save his broken marriage, he moved to Bratislava to join his wife, and in the following years until 1958 lived there alone, working as a translator from German and an art editor. However, he maintained written and personal contact with Prague friends (Mikuláš Medek, Egon Bondy) and sent them manuscripts of his translations. At that time, he was interested in Russian pre-revolutionary thinkers (Berdyaev, Shestov) and especially in existentialism and phenomenology (Nietzsche, Husserl, Schopenhauer, Freud, Jaspers, Heidegger),[8] Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse and Ludwig Feuerbach.[9] He was invited as a guest to the first exhibition of Group Máj in 1957, participated in the second exhibition in 1958 as a member and returned to Prague. Sekal joined Group Máj because of his friends, but he did not identify with the group's program. In the 1950s, under the influence of reading, he felt an "inner emigration", remained a solitaire in his work, and long before the August 1968 occupation, he was already thinking of leaving for Austria.[10]
The following year he travels to Moscow and Leningrad (1959) and in 1961, with sculptors Zdeněk Palcr and Miloslav Hájek, to Warsaw and Gdańsk. A classmate of Zdeněk Palcr from prof. Wagner's studio at VŠUP Alina Szapocznikow introduced him to the sculptor Barbara Pniewska,[11] whose material work was the inspiration for the first of his assemblages, which he called Assembled Pictures.[12] In the early 1960s he was close to Informel and was one of the initiators of the Imaginative and Structural Abstraction movement, but he differed in his strictly intellectual approach to his work.[13] In 1961 he married for the second time to Helena Waldvogel, with whom he had a son, Ondrej.
From 1961 he had his own studio on Bělohorská Street in Břevnov and in 1965 he had his first solo exhibitions in Václav Špála Gallery in Prague and House of the Lords of Kunštát in Brno. In 1966 he visited East Berlin and Dresden. In Germany, he made friendly contacts that enabled him, after emigrating, to take advantage of a DAAD scholarship offered by the Akademie der Künste and to acquire a small studio in Berlin.[14]
In the 1960s he participated in sculpture symposia in Gmunden (1964, 1965), St. Margarethen (1966) and Vyšné Ružbachy (1967). Even when chiselling the stone, he did not abandon the basic principle of connection with memory, and arrived at an organic shape that was reminiscent of the sandstone rocks in the Děčín region that he knew from his childhood.[15]
After the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, he emigrated first to Berlin,[16] then to Düsseldorf and in 1970 finally settled permanently in Vienna. He had to leave behind several dozen sculptures in Prague, only some of which could be brought to Vienna by his son, who was forced to emigrate by the StB in 1983.
From 1972 to 1974 he taught at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart. After his emigration he experienced a creative crisis, he missed his partner, who remained in Czechoslovakia, and the role of teacher was alien to his introvert nature.[17] In Vienna he married Christine Pulitzer. From 1974 to the early 1980s he was a member of the Wiener Secession. During the winter of 1980–1981, he spent a study stay in Amsterdam at the invitation of the Stedelijk Museum. In 1984 he received the City of Vienna Prize for Sculpture. In 1995 the National Gallery returned to Zbyněk Sekal the works held in Prague after his emigration throughout the period of normalisation until the fall of communism.
After 1989, his works were exhibited successively in Brno, Opava, Bratislava (1992–1993) and in a large retrospective exhibition at the Prague City Gallery in 1997. The National Gallery in Prague in the Trade Fair Palace reconstructed Sekal's Vienna studio in 2014 and is exhibiting it in a permanent exhibition together with a large body of Sekal's sculptures. The architectural design was created by the MCA studio [18] of architects Miroslav Cikán and Pavla Melková. The exhibition was curated by Marie Klimešová.
Sekal found a deep resonance with his work in Japan, which he visited twice in the last decade of his life (1989 and 1997).[19] [20] In July 1996, during the preparations for the Prague exhibition, he fell seriously ill and had to undergo lung surgery. He died in Vienna on 24 February 1998.
Sekal's first drawings influenced by Cubism and Expressionism were made in 1940–1941 and during his imprisonment during the war. His contact with Lubomír Vašátko,[21] who later perished in the Mauthausen concentration camp, was important. During his studies in 1945–1950 he was interested in figuration, but his experiments with the non-traditional techniques of surrealists, especially collages and frottage, foreshadowed his later interest in material creation. His sculptural work ranges between modelling and object and is based on the transformed principles of cubist sculpture. Fritz Wotruba was close to him artistically.[22]
Sekal maintained a close friendship with Mikuláš Medek, and in cycles of drawings, often self-portraits questioning his own personality (The Man Who Smokes), he tried different variations from the veristic to the expressive and imaginative. His photographs of his wife's Face with Surrealist Installations (1947) and his photographic montages anticipated the later similar work of Emila Medková in 1949. At this time, he also assembled surrealist objects and made several book cover designs for titles by Breton, Kafka, and Meyrink.[23] One of the earliest motifs of his postwar drawings is The Lamentation of the Hanged Man, followed by still lifes, drawings of birds, caricatured drawings of soldiers in uniform, and finally a cold, detached reminiscence of war (The Unknown General, 1959).
Sekal's first sculptural works are studies of heads and busts in patinated plaster (Head of a Girl, 1957, Bust, 1957), on which he tests simplified modelling. In the context of Czech sculpture of the 1950s, his Head with Closed Eyes (1955) is exceptional; it is a stylized self-portrait and does not depict sleep but an inward-looking gaze. It coincides with the break-up with his first wife Ludmila. Autobiographical tendencies in Sekal's work are also manifested in self-reflection through diary entries. He was conceptually close to Paul Klee and his "Portrait of a Man Experiencing the Inner World" and understanding art not as a "representation of the visible" but as "making visible in a more esoteric sense."[24]
In the late 1950s, Sekal created several intimate sculptures in which he deals with post-Cubist (Centaur and Lady, 1956) and imaginative inspirations (Bearing Figure, 1957). The sculpture Boy Blue Flower (1957) refers to Novalis's novel and in the context of Czech sculpture of the 1950s it represents an extraordinary act in its radicality and independence from any models.[25] The existential symbols are drawings and sculptures of birds (Bird, 1957), but especially two suggestive sculptures evoking the suffering of war (Screaming Head, Dead Head, both from 1957).[26]
The radical transformation of the figure resulted in a series of sculptures with a new content message (Dwelling, 1958, 1959), which Sekal then reworked in a different form in the 1980s. The term Dwelling comes from Kafka's short story Der Bau (1923–1924) (The Burrow, 1931) and is related to Sekal's need to find a shelter where he could escape from everyday traffic and work in a focused manner.[27] Dwelling II takes the loosely anthropomorphic form of a war invalid and represents a transition to a transparent system of lines without an inner core (Dwelling, 1958) and sculptures that take on the form of a building (Dwelling, 1964).[28] In the 1960s, his large-scale sculptures named Unsteady Structures are a means of self-identification and a representation of the feeling of fragility and the impossibility of finding a way out of this condition.[29] He constructed the sculptures as living organisms by cutting through matter and adding elements that represented labyrinths and secret caves. At the same time, his first composed (folded) reliefs were created, conceived as wire tangles (Tangle, 1967).[30]
Since the early 1960s, Sekal's figurative work has evolved towards a gradual deformation and simplification of form, sometimes with an emphasis on plastic volume (Dog, 1963), sometimes on the surface structures of sculpture (Signal, Tortured Torture, 1963). In the abstract themes, figuration is suppressed and empty volume plays an important role alongside mass (Signal, 1957, Letter, 1968) or the sculptures approach relief in rendering of surface (Dissection, 1963, Untitled, 1966).
In the composed wire-mesh pieces (assembled pictures), which Sekal has been creating since 1962 in parallel with material collages on paper, and which he considers to be a different means of painting, the primary inspiration of surrealist assemblage is evident, which puts discarded and damaged objects into new contexts. For his assemblages, Sekal mostly used objects already used, marked by human activity. In 1962–1963, he created the first series of wooden assemblages in the series Off the Beaten Track, (Holzwege) which he followed up with a series of works during his stay in Düsseldorf (wall relief, 1970) and further works in 1991–1995, conceived as precise inlaid miniatures made of natural wood.[31]
From 1964 onwards, he created intricate tangles of wire, fixed on wooden panels, which he called A Scheme for Purposeful Activity. By referring to Heidegger's notion of traffic (Betrieb), he expresses the existential significance of these labyrinths and his inner alienation from society.[32] The surface structuring shared by artists of the Confrontation group, who worked with Informel in the mid-1960s, is gradually replaced by a new quality, consisting in the creation of an apparent or real geometric order (Palindrome I, Royal Walk, 1968) and a more organized form of labyrinth. Sekal worked with a variety of found metal fragments, and in composing the relief he emphasized the memory of the material and sought a new metaphorical meaning for it (Truce, 1966). Unlike some of his generation contemporaries, even in the second half of the 1960s he managed to avoid formal exaltation and aestheticization, and his works increasingly tended towards expressive and formal austerity.[33] After his emigration, his assembled pictures became more characterized by a central symmetry, for which he found points of contact in the structural anthropology of Lévi Strauss.[34]
The stone labyrinth Little Stone (Mauthausen) from the 1966 symposium in Sankt Marghareten and Sekal's Self-Portrait (1973) as a tangle of brass wires, made during his time in Stuttgart, are unique works. Already in the mid-1960s, and then after his emigration in the 1970s, the need to find order in the chaos of wires manifested itself in the depiction of the cross as a traditional Christian symbol. These artworks also resulted from two years of work on a set of furnishings for the church in Lustenau (1977–1979).[35]
In 1964 Sekal created a plaster statue of the Crucified Christ imitating early medieval works for Vláčil's film Markéta Lazarová. In the 1960s, he participated in the newly established ceramic symposium in Gmunden, where he created block abstract sculptures and, during his second participation, a statue of the Crucified (1965) assembled from ceramic blocks. From the symposium in Sankt Margarethen in 1966, he traveled to the Venice Biennale, which became a strong artistic and spiritual experience and contributed to the purification of the form of his sculptures and composed pictures in the following years.[36]
In the chamber sculptures from the 1960s, there is still a rare hint of figuration (Please, No More, 1966); more often the titles symbolically denote the process of creation, as in Mikuláš Medek's paintings (Left - a Slightly Different Possibility, Truce, 1966), or refer to the process of rebirth of discarded things (What Remains of Forest, 1966). Although the starting points of Sekal's sculptures, reliefs and boxes refer to surrealism, he never considered himself a surrealist. Ultimately, the intellectual component, the exploration of spatial relationships and the desire to create order are always the defining process in his work.
Shortly before his emigration, Sekal was invited by architect Karel Filsak to design a ceramic tile facade for Prague's Intercontinental Hotel, which became one of the most outstanding brutalist architecture. Shortly after his departure from Czechoslovakia, he was commissioned by the director of Deutsche Bank to create a monumental wall made of stacked wood in David Hansemann's house in Düsseldorf. The wall, measuring about 6 x 12 m, has not survived and only designs on a scale of 1:10 are known.[37]
After emigrating to Vienna, he initially had no studio and in his drawings he tried to thematically build on the works he had to leave behind in Prague. In the wooden reliefs there were traces of objects and events or a missing centre. In the composed pictures, this hole refers to the open mouths of the sculptures Screaming Mouth and Dead Head, but also to the original existential feeling at their creation (Hole, 1977). During a painting symposium in Eisenstadt in 1973, he created assembled pictures from pieces of leather (Third Attempt to Simulate a Magical Object, 1973) and continued to collect and preserve material for further works until the 1990s. He also created a series of assembled pictures with Christian motifs, in which the symbol of suffering, apart from the cross, is the spikes themselves (The Cross, 1972, 1977). The obsession with nails haunted Sekal throughout his life. From the 1960s onwards, he worked with a limited register of subjects and preserved their materiality, but he carried his formal sobriety to extreme consequences, especially in his later works with stigmatic objects. A completely personal and intimate part of his work is the assembling of objects in pictures into numerical series. He copes with the trauma of his imprisonment in a concentration camp by converting his prisoner's number into mere banal numerical operations (17 × 13 = 221, From Number Count, 1991, 58 × 58 = 3248, 1993).[38] [39]
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Sekal returned to modeling and resumed miniature formats created in the early 1970s, which were prompted by a sense of confinement in the small space of the studio.[40] The chamber sculptures created in Vienna refer to post-Cubist figuration (Bust, 1988, Figure, 1989), or are studies of the relationship between the organic world and abstract spatial forms, and deliberately do not refer to the real object (Untitled, 1988, 1990). Between 1985 and 1991, he used traces of plant juices, which he completed in watercolour by means of free form associations. In addition to drawings, he made collages using waste materials such as banana peels and salami skins.[41]
The artist sometimes revisited the assembled pictures and reworked some of them. To avoid this, he came to the decision in 1983 to give them a third dimension in the form of boxes made of wooden slats, which he initially referred to as scaffolding.[42] These protect the original core around which they were assembled as something precious, but the core is also the pretext for the whole construction. As can be seen from the artist's diaries, the idea of building the sculpture from the inside, from its core towards the space, had been on his mind since 1966 and then again when he created the tabernacle for the church in Lustenau in 1979.[43] As an echo of the surrealist background of the sculptor's work, a common object, most often a board marked by traces of use, is usually at the centre of the boxes,[44] while the box sometimes represents a valuable (Mahogany Box, 1985), often complex, strictly geometric and rational construction (Box with an indicated cross, 1992, Labyrinth, 1993). The need to prevent others from touching the work and to enclose it in a box arose while he was working on a tabernacle.[45] It is also related to his interest in shamanism and black magic, which dates back to a visit to the Musée de l'Homme in Paris in 1947 and deepened during a stay in Amsterdam, where he visited the ethnographic collections at the Tropenmuseum and studied ethnological literature and books on magic and shamanism.[46]
A series of Copper Cases (wire metal boxes) from the early 1990s contain no core and are rather a kind of outline of a sculpture, constructed into complex spatial forms (Copper Box, 1991). They are based on visual multiplicity and assembled from structural elements densely wrapped with thin copper wire with accentuated joints.[47]
Sekal's sculptures from the late 1980s and early 1990s have a small scale and abstract geometric shapes, sometimes referring to figuration (Bust, 1988). After returning from Japan, he felt the need to create sculptures with a rounded organic shape and realized several variations based on a plaster cast of a found stone (Variations on the Kritzendorf Stone, 1992).[48] At the same time, he designed a memorial to the writer H. P. Lovecraft (1990), a sculpture for the grave of Alfred Schmeller and the Memorial to the Jews of Vienna who were killed during the war (1992). Between 1995 and 1997, he redesigned the plaster sculptures that returned from Prague National Gallery. In particular, he cut up and reassembled the Unsteady Buildings, which he had intended for his retrospective exhibition at the Prague City Gallery. Sekal concluded his creative activity with an extraordinary accomplishment, transforming his last studio into a total work of art six months before his death.[49] The studio was reinstalled in this form as part of the National Gallery exhibition of modern art at the Trade Fair Palace in Prague.[50]
Sekal's entire oeuvre is deeply introvert, as the following quote from his text Abdication attests:We want to go our own way, which we hardly know at all yet. We don't want to resemble other people, their faces are becoming more and more like the faces of idiots. It doesn't matter much about this observation, they consider us idiots too, it has always been like that. We don't want to be happy their way.