Aleš Veselý (3 February 1935 – 14 December 2015) was a Czech sculptor, graphic artist, painter and academy teacher.
Life Aleš Veselý was born on 3 February 1935 in Čáslav. He came from a mixed Jewish family of an insurance clerk and during World War II he lived with his parents in Hradec Králové. As a six-year-old boy, he had to wear the yellow six-pointed star in public and this experience marked him for life. His father and sister were deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Terezín, but managed to escape before the end of the war and returned home. During the war, 47 of his relatives were murdered.Aleš Veselý, Tři brány, 2005, p. 19 Aleš Veselý, as a Jew, was not allowed to go to school and did not graduate from the fifth grade of primary school until after the war. His father got a new job in Ústí nad Labem, where Aleš Veselý started to study at the gymnasium. After the education reform he finished the so-called Unified School of the Second Grade in Prague.
From childhood he painted and later attended the Secondary Art school in Prague, but after two years his professors recommended him to go to the Academy. At the age of seventeen, he was admitted without a high school diploma and without meeting the prescribed minimum age to the graphic arts preparatory school. Eventually he completed his entire studies in the graphic studio of Prof. Vladimír Silovský, where there was a very free atmosphere and it was sufficient to bring one's home works several times during the year. Since moving to Prague, he learned to play the piano while improvising and composing his own music. Until the early 1960s, he considered music more creative and hesitated to pursue it professionally. It was not until the advent of abstraction that he finally decided to pursue visual art.Aleš Veselý, in: Michal Schonberg 2007, p. 44
During his studies, he went to the small mountain village of Sihelné in the Slovak Western Carpathians to paint during holidays, and later also in autumn and winter. He himself states that the village's archetypal environment, reading and music were at the origin of his journey towards abstraction.Aleš Veselý, in: Michal Schonberg 2007, p. 63 After graduating from the Prague Academy (1952–1958), he was automatically accepted as a candidate of the Union of Visual Artists, which allowed him to apply for creative scholarships and public commissions or to acquire his own studio. After three years, however, he was told that his works expressed a view of life that contradicted the conclusions of the 14th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and his support was terminated. In the late 1950s, he became interested in material abstraction and was one of a group of artists who later held the first unofficial studio exhibition, called Confrontation in Jiří Valenta's studio. The second of these exhibitions took place in the autumn of 1960 in the newly acquired basement studio of Aleš Veselý in Žižkov. In 1960, a congress of the international association of art critics AICA was held in Warsaw, whose participants then visited Prague. The hastily organised visit to the studios appealed to Pierre Restany, who, together with some others, published a series of articles on modern Czech art in the magazines Kunstwerk and Cimaise.
At the beginning of the 1960s, when the regime was partially relaxed, Aleš Veselý had his first solo exhibition at the Young Artists Gallery of Umělecká beseda (1963). This was followed by the ground-breaking Exhibition D at the Nová síň Gallery in 1964, where the leading protagonists of Czech Informel presented themselves as mature individuals and their differentiation of opinion became fully apparent.Jan Kříž, in: Nešlehová M (ed.), Czech Informel, 1991, p. 240 Aleš Veselý exhibited his sculptures Chair-Usurper and Enigmatic Objects there. The following year he received the Critics' Prize at the Biennale de Paris.
In 1967, after Aleš Veselý's father died in May, he and seven other sculptors were invited to the first Symposium of Spatial Forms in Ostrava. His stay in the steelworks, where he had an unlimited amount of material at his disposal and where he created seven sculptures, was gradually extended by the organisers of the symposium until 1968 and was only ended by the Invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops on 21 August 1968. His most famous sculpture, Kaddish, which he saw as his personal prayer for his deceased father, was created there. He then returned to Prague, where his daughter Jana was born from his first marriage (1968). In 1969 he participated in the exhibition Sculpture and the City in Liberec and received the Matthias Braun Award from the international jury for his sculpture Kaddish (named Prayer for the Deceased for the exhibition). His sculptures, including the "Chair-Usurper", were purchased by the National Gallery in PragueAleš Veselý, Chair – Usurper, National Gallery Prague in the same year. The exhibition of the sculpture Prayer for the Dead evoked unintended connotations at the time when Jan Palach burned himself to death. At the beginning of the so-called normalization in 1970, Aleš Veselý was among the artists who were persecuted by the regime, lost the possibility to exhibit or bid for public commissions. He had to hastily take care of the rescue of the Kaddish, which was threatened with scrapping. Other sculptures were temporarily placed in a welding workshop on the outskirts of Prague before he managed to acquire a demolished mill and fenced-off land in the village of Středokluky. While moving the sculptures in early 1971, he suffered a heart attack. In 1972, for unexplained reasons, his wife committed suicide by jumping from a window, seriously injuring their daughter Jana.
In the 1970s, he withdrew into isolation in his studio in Středokluky, and in this timelessness, paradoxically, he experienced absolute freedom of creation because he could not expect to exhibit the works. Until 1982, he was a member of the alternative music group Frog's Slime, which also participated in the Prague Jazz Days and recorded several pieces of improvised industrial jazz in the sound studio of the Atelier Theatre (now the seat of the Ypsilon Theatre). The recordings were released on two CDs by Guerilla Records.Guerilla records, ŽABÍ HLEN – ŽABÍ HLEN IIAleš Veselý, in: Michal Schonberg 2007, pp. 168–173 In the late 1970s he was invited to participate in a sculpture symposium in Bochum and was given permission to travel. During his stay in Bochum in 1979, he received another offer and won a competition to execute another giant fifteen-ton sculpture in the city of Hamm the following year.
In 1986, Aleš Veselý received an American scholarship from the Soros Foundation. His journey to the USA was preceded by several hours of interrogation by the State Security and intimidation, but he eventually got his passport back and was able to leave. On the recommendation of the French art theorist Pierre Restany, who visited the studio in Středokluky in the mid-1980s, Aleš Veselý was selected among the world artists who were invited to exhibit and create in Seoul during the Olympics (1988). His sculpture Testimony from 1968 was placed in the Olympic Park.
After the fall of the communist regime, Aleš Veselý had his first exhibition in an official exhibition hall in 27 years (Nová síň Gallery, 4 June – 1 July 1990) and was also asked to take over teaching sculpture at the Prague Academy. He worked as the head of the monumental sculpture studio at the Academy from 1990 to 2006 and then for another three years at the Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem (2012–2015). In 1992 he had a major exhibition in the Ballroom of Prague Castle and adjacent gardens. During the 1990s he was frequently invited abroad (Germany, USA, Japan, Israel) and repeatedly exhibited in regional galleries. In 2005–2006, the Egon Schiele Art Centre in Český Krumlov held a retrospective exhibition of his work, and in 2009 his monumental sculptures were exhibited in Litomyšl. On the occasion of the artist's 80th birthday in 2015, simultaneous exhibitions were held in four Prague galleries and in his studio in Středokluky. Aleš Veselý died unexpectedly in Prague on 14 December 2015.
Scholarships 1995 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Chicago, IL, USA 1993 Arts Link Fellowship at The Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia, PA, USA 1986 International Sculpture Center Fellowship, Washington, D.C., USA
Awards 1994 The Chicago Prize, John David Mooney Foundation, Chicago, IL, USA 1969 Matthias Braun Prize for the Kaddish sculpture at the exhibition Sculpture and the City, Liberec 1965 Critics' Prize for the sculpture Chair Usurper at the 4th Biennale de Paris, France
Work
Between 1953 and 1956, during his annual months-long stays in Sihelné, Aleš Veselý created hundreds of landscape drawings and psychological studies of the local inhabitants. Until 1959, his paintings, woodcuts and drawings featured spiritual landscapes and ghostly apparitions into which he transformed his life experiences and personal myths.Central european art database: Aleš Veselý From 1959 he began to use natural materials such as stones, clay, sand and leaves in his entirely abstract paintings (the "Magma" series) and later also used found metal objects, which he fused with synthetic resin and treated with flame.
At the end of the 1950s, Aleš Veselý was one of the most significant protagonists of the Czech Informel – a wave of abstract expression that responded to the social atmosphere and the Stalinist rape of art by turning to purely subjective work with a strong existential subtext. The work of the time was sharply opposed to the officially supported socialist realism and, with its reference to medieval mysticism and expressiveness, drew on the older tradition of Czech art from the Gothic through the Baroque to Surrealism.
The source of abstraction was not a gradual simplification of the seen realityAleš Veselý, in: Michal Schonberg 2007, p. 234 or an immediate record of intimate feelings as in the case of tachism or so-called action painting. Abstraction, as understood by the creators of Czech Informel, started from nothing, it did not depict anything, but the work itself represented a new reality and the meaning resided in him alone. The artwork was an objectification of the artist's entire personality, a "psychophysical field" transformed into the surface of a painting or a three-dimensional object.Nešlehová M, 1991, p. 26 The material objects, using the principle of assemblage, were deliberately non-colourful (a predominance of black, brown and natural colours of raw materials), made up of unusual materials (metal sheets, wood, textiles, plastic, asphalt, etc.), which were brutally destroyed and joined together with synthetic resin. The objects thus acquired an emotional urgency and the character of magical objects as if marked by the patina of time. The artist's intention was not a new aesthetic appreciation of these materials, devoid of their own content or value, but to use them to emphasize the underlying message.František Šmejkal, Argumenty I, in: Nešlehová M (ed.), Český informel, 1991, p. 244
Between 1961 and 1963, a series of Stigmatic Objects were created – assemblage reliefs made of wood and metal, joined with synthetic resin and welding, which depict deep wounds and scars and are an expression of mental trauma rather than a physical wound.Aleš Veselý, in: Michal Schonberg 2007, p. 103 After the first exhibition, Aleš Veselý had the opportunity to realise the relief object Indetermination of the Circle and the Line for the Czech Airlines in Rome in 1964. This was followed by mostly welded Enigmatic Objects,Aleš Veselý, Enigma III, National Gallery Prague some of which were intended as sculptures for open space. His Enigma of the Circle was installed in the old airport building in Prague-Ruzyně (1965).