Pavel Nešleha (19 February 1937 – 13 September 2003) was a Czech painter, draughtsman, printmaker, photographer and creator of light objects. He received a number of important awards for his graphic and drawing work. He has exhibited individually since 1967 and participated in collective exhibitions since 1965. After the Soviet occupation in August 1968 and during the subsequent normalization, he was not allowed to exhibit freely. During the communist regime he was a member of the informal groups "Somráci (Vagabonds)" and "Zaostalí (the Backwards)". After 1990 he was a professor of painting at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague.
Life He was born in Prague,Nešlehová M, in: P. Wittlich: Pavel Nešleha, 2004, p. 289 where he also attended primary school. His interest in art was inspired by the painter Vladimír Šebík, a pupil of Martin Salcman, who led an art club at the school. He continued his studies at the Václav Hollar Art School (1952–1956), where he also met his future friends: Zdeněk Beran, Antonín Málek, Kateřina Černá, Petr Bareš and Václav Křížek. Professors Zdeněk Balaš and Karel Tondl, under whom he studied, encouraged their students to learn about Czech modern art.Sophistica Gallery: Pavel Nešleha During his studies he had an opportunity to get acquainted with the private collection of art historian Vincenc Kramář, visited the studio of Emil Filla and saw the works of the Osma art group in Brno private collections. At the end of his studies, he attended public lectures by Prof. Jaromír Pečírka on the trends of modern art.
From 1956 to 1962 he studied in the studio of monumental and applied painting of prof. Alois Fišárek at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. A breakthrough experience for his generation was the exhibition Founders of Czech Modern Art, organized in 1957 by Jiří Padrta and Miroslav Lamač in Brno. It was here that he first saw the expressive raw works of the Czech pre-war avant-garde - Kubišta, Filla, Procházka and Gutfreund.Pavel Nešleha, in: P. Wittlich: Pavel Nešleha, 2004, s. 46 During his studies, he attended meetings of young, avant-garde-oriented dissatisfied artists held in Antonín Tomalík's studio in Prague. Here he met artists from the future Confrontation circle as well as generationally related art history students František Šmejkal and Zdenek Felix. Together with Tomalík, Málek, Sion, Beran, Putta, Barborka, Steklík and others, he belonged to an informal group formed in pubs that called themselves "Somráci" (Vagabonds). They were united by a sense of defiance against the lack of freedom of the 1950s, a consciousness of being excluded and by radical attitudes.
At the end of the 1950s, he took part in a school trip to Leningrad and Moscow; in the deposits of the galleries there, he got to know the originals of the leading figures of the European avant-garde, including works by Picasso, Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Malevich, Chagall and Kandinsky. At the turn of 1959–1960, he attended lectures on modern and contemporary music organized by Dr. Josef Löwenbach for a circle of young artists and musicians. He maintained a friendship with Pavel Teimer, a student of typography in the studio of František Muzika at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, and with his peers from the circle of Prague studio Confrontations (1960). In 1960 he met Vladimír Boudník, whose unique graphic art inspired many followers. Nešleha's abstract composition for the space of the Music Theatre in Hradec Králové, which he submitted as his diploma thesis, was rejected for ideological reasons and destroyed on the spot; he completed his studies in 1962 with a set of expressive paintings from his junior year, for which he won the school's prize.Nešlehová M, in: P. Wittlich: Pavel Nešleha, 2004, p. 290
He served his compulsory military service from 1962 to 1964 in Kolín, where he became acquainted with the work of Zdenek Rykr at the local museum. In 1965, he participated in the first official exhibition Confrontation III at the Aleš Hall and other collective exhibitions (Gallery Fronta, 10 graphic artists in Ústí nad Orlicí). At the Book Graphics Fair in Leipzig (1965), together with Pavel Teimer, he received an honourable mention for a typographic set and for a set of structural prints for selected texts of Shakespeare's Hamlet. In 1967 he held his first solo exhibition at the Gallery of Youth in Prague's Mánes. He became acquainted with Jindřich Chalupecký and participated in his activities at the Václav Špála Gallery in Prague, as well as in subsequent private meetings held in private studios; he learned photography. At the beginning of 1968, he received a three-month scholarship from the French government and left for Paris in April 1968. His knowledge of the local art scene and the creative freedom there had a lasting influence on him. Shortly after the August occupation, he married Mahulena Hromádková, a student of art history, and took a study trip with her to Germany, Sweden, Holland and Belgium. At that time he also completed the construction of an attic studio in Vinohrady, which he used also as an apartment until 1986.
Beginning in 1970 and during normalization, with the help of friends and despite the bans, he participated in international exhibitions devoted to graphic art and drawing, where he won a number of important awards. He has participated in the prestigious exhibitions Biennale Internationale de l'estampe, Paris; Cien Grabados y Cien Fotografias, Universidad Nacional Autonóma de Mexico, Mexico City; 3. Internazionale der Zeichnung, Darmstadt; 9. International Graphic Art Exhibition, Moderna galerija, Ljubljana or Biennale of Drawing in New York, held in 1977. His success at the Darmstadt Triennial of Drawing in 1970 brought him an offer of a teaching position in drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kassel, but despite numerous urgings from the German side, the Ministry of Culture of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic did not allow him to apply. In 1971, he won a gold medal at the Trieste Biennial of Graphic Arts (Premio Césare Sofianopulo) and in 1975 a silver medal for graphic art at the MIR 75 international exhibition, which was organized for the 30th anniversary of the United Nations.GVU Ostrava: Pavel Nešleha
At the beginning of the 1970s he was approached by the architect Miroslav Hrubý to design lighting for the vaulted Baroque space of the castle.Pavel Nešleha, in: P. Wittlich: Pavel Nešleha, 2004, p. 136 Since 1971 he has been devoted to spatial lighting objects, for which he received a patent.Nešlehová M, in: P. Wittlich: Pavel Nešleha, 2004, s. 293 He used them for the set of the Liberec theatre Ypsilonka for the performance Depeše psané na kolečkách. He exhibited some of the objects of the Light Twelve-hedron (1972–1973) and large-scale drawings from the Chairs series (1972) at a solo exhibition at the Baukunst Gallery in Cologne in 1974, but was not allowed to travel there. He made several light objects in the Iranian pavilion at the World Oceanographic Expo in Okinawa, Japan in 1974, from where he made a short study tour of Japan (Tokyo, Nara, Kyoto). He subsequently used the architectural project of a luminous Twelve-hedron with the symbolism of hand reliefs partly for an installation in the Marble Palace in Tehran (1976). During his stay in Iran he had the opportunity to visit other cities - Persepolis, Ifsahan, Meshed, Shiraz and some smaller towns in the desert.Nešlehová M, in: P. Wittlich: Pavel Nešleha, 2004, p. 294 The monumental pathos of the Iranian landscape made Nešleha to return to painting and colour.Pavel Nešleha, in: P. Wittlich: Pavel Nešleha, 2004, p. 156
In 1977 the Nešleha family had a daughter, Johanna.Johanna Genest Neslehova, Professor, Mathematics and Statistics, McGill University, Montréal In the late 1970s he returned to painting. In 1979, he was in the Premio internazionale exhibition in Biella, Italy, in a selection of 20 world graphic artists. In the same year, Jan Kříž managed to prepare an exhibition of 10 x 5 drawings in Valašské Meziříčí, where, in addition to Nešleha, Beran, Lamr, Mergl, Načeradský, Nepraš, Sion, Sopko, Steklík and Šimotová exhibited. Galerie Sonnenring in Münster (1980) organized a small retrospective for him in cooperation with art historian Jan Kříž. He had further chamber exhibitions in small unofficial exhibition spaces in Brno ("Club of Education", "Veterinary Institute"). Together with Zdeněk Beran, he became close friends with Bedřich Dlouhý and Hugo Demartini. At the beginning of September 1981, he participated in a private exhibition of eighteen selected artists and theoreticians of modern art at Bedřich Dlouhý's estate in Netvořice, organized on the initiative of Jindřich Chalupecký. The participants were followed and identified by the police. He took part in an unofficial exhibition in the Gamekeeper's lodge at the Star Game Preserve, prepared by Marie Klimešová in 1982. In 1983 he had solo exhibitions of paintings and drawings at the Regional Museum in Kolín (Jan Kříž) and then at the Old Town Hall in Prague (Hana Rousová)Nešlehová M, in. Wittlich: Pavel Nešleha, 2004, p. 295 and was represented at the prestigious show Dessins tchèques du 20e siècle at the Centre Georges Pompidou. On that occasion, he was able to travel for the first time in a long time and visited Paris.
In 1984-1986 he worked on environments with painting and photography. In 1986, Jiří Valoch organized Nešleha's retrospective in Brno at the House of the Lords of Kunštát. In a joint exhibition with Hugo Demartini in Zižkov Atrium Gallery he exhibited some door objects from the series Illusions in Privacy. In the summer of 1986 the Nešleha family moved to Braník.Nešlehová M, in: P. Wittlich: Pavel Nešleha, 2004, p. 296 Since 1987 Pavel Nešleha was a member of the association New Group.New Group: Summer 1991
During the preparation of a joint installation at the unofficial intergenerational exhibition Forum '88 in the Holešovice marketplace in Prague, a group with the ironic name Zaostalí (The Backwards) emerged from a friendly and opinionated group (Dlouhý, Demartini, Beran, Nešleha). Subsequently, they invited the composer Jan Klusák (as a theoretician) and the architect Karel Kouba for an upcoming unofficial multimedia exhibition, which was to take place in People's House in Vysočany at the end of 1989. After the collapse of the communist regime, it was never held and The Backwards were given the opportunity to exhibit in the Nová síň Gallery and in the Mánes Building of the Society of Visual Artists.cz/zaostali-forever-5076285 Zaostalí Forever, ČRo Mozaika, 2007 In autumn 1989 Pavel Nešleha made a study trip to Italy (Venice, Florence, Rome), where he became more familiar with Caravaggio's and Tintoretto's paintings.Nešlehová M, in: P. Wittlich: Pavel Nešleha, 2004, p 297
In 1990, Nešleha received a creative grant from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and from the same year until 2002 he was the head of the painting studio at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. In 1991 he was appointed professor. He prepared a number of study trips abroad for his students (Italy, Germany, Spain, France).Nešlehová M, in. 298 Since 1991 he has participated in Czechoslovak art shows abroad (Bonn, Osnabrück, Bochum, Vienna, Paris, Sarajevo, Tuzla). In 1992 he took part in the international creative symposium Baroque and Today in Litoměřice. On the occasion of the AICA Congress in Prague, The Backwards installed their individual artefacts, created at the end of the communist regime, in Mánes as a joint work under the title "Pile".