Lot 168

Ladislav Zívr (1909 - 1980) SIREN

As PhDr. Jaromír Typlt, the author of a definitive monograph about Zívr, explains, “Siren is an entirely unique work in sculptor Ladislav Zívr’s oeuvre in several respects. The artist, who until that time had tended to focus on smaller formats in fired clay and plaster, decided here to work a walnut trunk with a final height of 236 cm – of his works, only one of two sandstone sculptures he made for the 1966 sculpture symposium in Hořice surpassed this height. Zívr had prepared returning to wood as a base material since the late 1950s – ‘I want to work in wood, if I live in the forest’ (newspaper 31 August 1959). When in 1964, after moving to a new, larger studio in Ždírce/Stará Paka, he picked out a walnut trunk to sculpt, his process returned to when he had been conducting surrealist experiments with various materials; here he added a hemp rope and metal parts to the wood. With its height, Siren (Zívr had originally also considered the title Birdcall) was to provide a new scale for Zívr’s next plaster and clay sculptures. Working a finished trunk was also a different experience than modelling in clay: ‘While working I pay attention to the shapes defined by the wood and branches, because when I work with clay I get inspired by randomly arising shapes. A sense for art defines what to chop off, curve, flatten, give proportions. Subconsciously and consciously I get everything in there that I want to have. The completed work then tells what life experiences made it in there. How much emotion and poetry. When he saw my things, the Polish painter Lenica spoke of eroticism. That should be in art, and apparently I’ve got it in there. Nature’s shapes are erotic.” (26 January 1965). The work was first reproduced in the journal Výtvarné práci  1965/20 and it has been presented at Zívr’s solo exhibition in Hradec Králové in 1965 and at a joint exhibition of František Gross, Ladislav Zívr and Miroslav Hák in Kramář Gallery, Prague (1967). In recent years it was on long-term loan at the National Gallery in Prague. In the catalogue raisonné of Zívr’s sculptures in the monograph published by Kant in 2013, Siréna is listed under no. 297 and is reproduced on page 214.”