Lot 159

Zbyněk Sekal (1923 - 1998) A MADONNA

Zbyněk Sekal is one of the artists of the Central European modernist generation of the 1960s, and probably one of the most mysterious. His work was created over a wide time span, from the turn of the 1930s and 1940s until 1997, when, a few months before his death, his illness prevented him from continuing his work. Sekal - like Piesen - was interested in a more intellectual work with material based more on dialogue and the process of searching, on the exploration of spatial relationships and the attempt to create order. He did not fully identify with any movement, tendency or group and remained a distinctly solitary artist. After studying at UMPRUM in the studio of F. Tichý, where he met, for example, Mikuláš Medek and Stanislav Podhrázský, he soon became one of the most interesting Czech artists of the 1950s and 1960s. From 1970 he lived in Vienna, where his work underwent another remarkable development. He considers the relief paintings, the so-called folded paintings, which were created from 1962 onwards, to be a different means of painting, and his primary inspiration from surrealist assemblage, which puts discarded and damaged objects into new contexts, is evident. His work displays an unusual profundity and sophistication. This meticulous craftsmanship is also exhibited in the exceptional work Madonna, where the tightness and enclosure of the work coexist as much as the space opening up to our contemplation. The work is also interesting for its figurative subject matter, as these are rather rare compared to the 1950s. Of Sekal's work, which Werner Hofmann characterizes as a category of interspace, he writes: "Their ambivalence has nothing to do with the magic of the objects, achieved by bizarre props - here there is depth in the surface, an intangible dimension is hidden in the simple material, the "aura" emanates from materiality." By revealing the hidden surface, the interior is also revealed. In the work on offer, the artist manifests a distinctive expression of how to deal with matter and the fragments of our world.