Lot 177

Ladislav Zívr (1909 - 1980) FUNERAL HORSES

Throughout his life, Ladislav Zívr strived for simplicity and the fullness of shapes - an ideal he brought from his family's pottery tradition. In his work of loose, relief, and portrait sculptures he went through several periods of development - late cubism, surrealism, gutfreund civilism, and symbolically tuned spiritualism. Zívr is characterized by a fascination with death and associated with organic, directly biological forms. Experimenting with the material closest to his heart - clay - he even invented his own technique of moulage (a combination of natural materials and liquid plaster). The offered sculpture is one of the author's key works from the period of World War II when the motif of the horse appears in a well-known sculpture created between 1943/44 under the title Head of the Funeral Horse. The work on offer is a sketch for such a motif when spirituality and melancholy were ubiquitous themes drawn from the artworks of Jan Zrzavý and the poetry of Otokar Březina. Published in the author's monograph Typlt, Jaromír. Ladislav Zívr. Kant, 2013, p. 128, in the list of works under number 74.