Zbyněk Sekal (12 July 1923 – 24 February 1998) was a Czech sculptor, painter and translator. During World War II he was imprisoned for three years in the Mauthausen concentration camp. After the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, he emigrated to Austria. Already in the mid-1960s, he was considered one of the most important and distinctive Czech sculptors.Karel Miller, Kronika výstav, Výtvarná práce 13, 1965, no. 8, pp. 6–7
Life 1923–1968 In 1934–1941 he graduated from the Real Gymnasium and the Business Academy and then worked briefly as an intern at the Topič publishing house. Before the war, he was already involved in the activities of the Comité de la democratie de España and later worked in the left-wing anti-Nazi National Movement of Working Youth.Klimešová M: Biography, in: Zbyněk Sekal, 2015, p. 414 At the beginning of the war, he lost his father. In 1941, at the age of eighteen, he was arrested for distributing leaflets, imprisoned in Pankrác Prison in Prague, in the Small Fortress in Terezín, and for the next three years until the end of the war in Mauthausen concentration camp, where he worked for a year in a stone quarry.Klimešová M, in: Zbyněk Sekal, 2015, p. 253 In the concentration camp, he became close to the Polish painter Marian Bogusz, and later, as a scribe in an office, he perfected his German, from which he later translated very difficult philosophical texts.Klimešová M: Childhood, Camp, UMPRUM, in: Zbyněk Sekal, 2015, p. 13
In 1945, he was accepted to study at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague in the studio of prof. František Tichý and made friends with his classmates Mikuláš Medek, Stanislav Podhrázský, Josef Lehoučka and Zdeněk Palcr. He rejoined the Spořilov Surrealist group, which had been formed by his friends of the same generation at the beginning of the war.Klimešová M: Studies, Surrealists in the Tichý Atelier, in: Zbyněk Sekal, 2015, p. 23 On a trip to Paris organized for students in 1947 by prof. Václav Nebeský, he visited the International Surrealism Exhibition at the Galerie Maeght several times. He was strongly impressed by the rawness of the installations with reminiscences of war and camps and the primitivizing paintings (in the Foyer de l'Art Brut ) by Jean Dubuffet. He also made the acquaintance of Toyen, who was preparing paintings for an exhibition in Prague at Topič Salon. Shortly before his trip to Paris, at the age of 24, he married the painter Ludmila Purkyňová, with whom he had a son, Jan.Klimešová M, in: Zbyněk Sekal, 2015, p. 24
He continued his studies at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague under prof. František Muzika and in the studio of prof. Emil Filla, but in 1950 he left the school without a diploma to avoid politicized state exams. After leaving school, he belonged to the so-called Libeň circle of Bohumil Hrabal and was the author of the generational statement "Postscript or Abdication" (1951), which was first published in samizdat as part of Hrabal's book The Tender Barbarian (Petlice edition).Klimešová M, in: Zbyněk Sekal, 2015, pp. 43, 437–438
In 1951–1953 he was employed as a publicity officer at the General Directorate of Meat Industry and as a literary editor at the Political Literature Publishing House (later Svoboda publishing house). In the winter of 1952/1953 he completed his military service. In a futile attempt to save his broken marriage, he moved to Bratislava to join his wife, and in the following years until 1958 lived there alone, working as a translator from German and an art editor. However, he maintained written and personal contact with Prague friends (Mikuláš Medek, Egon Bondy) and sent them manuscripts of his translations. At that time, he was interested in Russian pre-revolutionary thinkers (Berdyaev, Shestov) and especially in existentialism and phenomenology (Nietzsche, Husserl, Schopenhauer, Freud, Jaspers, Heidegger),Klimešová M, in: Zbyněk Sekal, 2015, p. 47, 441-443 Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse and Ludwig Feuerbach.Klimešová M, in: Zbyněk Sekal, 2015, p. 50 He was invited as a guest to the first exhibition of Group Máj in 1957, participated in the second exhibition in 1958 as a member and returned to Prague. Sekal joined Group Máj because of his friends, but he did not identify with the group's program. In the 1950s, under the influence of reading, he felt an "inner emigration", remained a solitaire in his work, and long before the August 1968 occupation, he was already thinking of leaving for Austria.Klimešová M, in: Zbyněk Sekal, 2015, p. 58-60, 444
The following year he travels to Moscow and Leningrad (1959) and in 1961, with sculptors Zdeněk Palcr and Miloslav Hájek, to Warsaw and Gdańsk. A classmate of Zdeněk Palcr from prof. Wagner's studio at VŠUP Alina Szapocznikow introduced him to the sculptor Barbara Pniewska,Art UK: Barbara Pniewska whose material work was the inspiration for the first of his assemblages, which he called Assembled Pictures.Klimešová M, in: Zbyněk Sekal, 2015, p. 474 In the early 1960s he was close to Informel and was one of the initiators of the Imaginative and Structural Abstraction movement, but he differed in his strictly intellectual approach to his work.Klimešová M, in: Zbyněk Sekal, 2015, p. 45 In 1961 he married for the second time to Helena Waldvogel, with whom he had a son, Ondrej.
From 1961 he had his own studio on Bělohorská Street in Břevnov and in 1965 he had his first solo exhibitions in Václav Špála Gallery in Prague and House of the Lords of Kunštát in Brno. In 1966 he visited East Berlin and Dresden. In Germany, he made friendly contacts that enabled him, after emigrating, to take advantage of a DAAD scholarship offered by the Akademie der Künste and to acquire a small studio in Berlin.Klimešová M, in: Zbyněk Sekal, 2015, p. 183
In the 1960s he participated in sculpture symposia in Gmunden (1964, 1965), St. Margarethen (1966) and Vyšné Ružbachy (1967). Even when chiselling the stone, he did not abandon the basic principle of connection with memory, and arrived at an organic shape that was reminiscent of the sandstone rocks in the Děčín region that he knew from his childhood.Klimešová M, in: Zbyněk Sekal, 2015, pp. 250–253, 485
1968–1998 After the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, he emigrated first to Berlin,Zbyněk Sekal: Berlin then to Düsseldorf and in 1970 finally settled permanently in Vienna. He had to leave behind several dozen sculptures in Prague, only some of which could be brought to Vienna by his son, who was forced to emigrate by the StB in 1983.
From 1972 to 1974 he taught at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart. After his emigration he experienced a creative crisis, he missed his partner, who remained in Czechoslovakia, and the role of teacher was alien to his introvert nature.Klimešová M, in: Zbyněk Sekal, 2015, p. 70 In Vienna he married Christine Pulitzer. From 1974 to the early 1980s he was a member of the Wiener Secession. During the winter of 1980–1981, he spent a study stay in Amsterdam at the invitation of the Stedelijk Museum. In 1984 he received the City of Vienna Prize for Sculpture. In 1995 the National Gallery returned to Zbyněk Sekal the works held in Prague after his emigration throughout the period of normalisation until the fall of communism.
After 1989, his works were exhibited successively in Brno, Opava, Bratislava (1992–1993) and in a large retrospective exhibition at the Prague City Gallery in 1997. The National Gallery in Prague in the Trade Fair Palace reconstructed Sekal's Vienna studio in 2014 and is exhibiting it in a permanent exhibition together with a large body of Sekal's sculptures. The architectural design was created by the MCA studio MCA of architects Miroslav Cikán and Pavla Melková. The exhibition was curated by Marie Klimešová.
Sekal found a deep resonance with his work in Japan, which he visited twice in the last decade of his life (1989 and 1997).Sekal and Japan (in Czech), 2014 In July 1996, during the preparations for the Prague exhibition, he fell seriously ill and had to undergo lung surgery. He died in Vienna on 24 February 1998.
Awards 1984 City of Vienna Prize for Sculpture
Work Sekal's first drawings influenced by Cubism and Expressionism were made in 1940–1941 and during his imprisonment during the war. His contact with Lubomír Vašátko,Lubomír Vašátko, born 5 September 1919 in Jihlava - 1942 Mauthausen, was a pharmaceutical aspirant and surrealist painter, active before the war in the student association Youth Culture. who later perished in the Mauthausen concentration camp, was important. During his studies in 1945–1950 he was interested in figuration, but his experiments with the non-traditional techniques of surrealists, especially collages and frottage, foreshadowed his later interest in material creation. His sculptural work ranges between modelling and object and is based on the transformed principles of cubist sculpture. Fritz Wotruba was close to him artistically.Klimešová M: Introduction, in: Zbyněk Sekal, 2015, p. 11
Sekal maintained a close friendship with Mikuláš Medek, and in cycles of drawings, often self-portraits questioning his own personality (The Man Who Smokes), he tried different variations from the veristic to the expressive and imaginative. His photographs of his wife's Face with Surrealist Installations (1947) and his photographic montages anticipated the later similar work of Emila Medková in 1949. At this time, he also assembled surrealist objects and made several book cover designs for titles by Breton, Kafka, and Meyrink.Klimešová M, in: Zbyněk Sekal, 2015, pp. 27–30 One of the earliest motifs of his postwar drawings is The Lamentation of the Hanged Man, followed by still lifes, drawings of birds, caricatured drawings of soldiers in uniform, and finally a cold, detached reminiscence of war (The Unknown General, 1959).
Sekal's first sculptural works are studies of heads and busts in patinated plaster (Head of a Girl, 1957, Bust, 1957), on which he tests simplified modelling. In the context of Czech sculpture of the 1950s, his Head with Closed Eyes (1955) is exceptional; it is a stylized self-portrait and does not depict sleep but an inward-looking gaze. It coincides with the break-up with his first wife Ludmila. Autobiographical tendencies in Sekal's work are also manifested in self-reflection through diary entries. He was conceptually close to Paul Klee and his "Portrait of a Man Experiencing the Inner World" and understanding art not as a "representation of the visible" but as "making visible in a more esoteric sense."Klimešová M, in: Zbyněk Sekal, 2015, pp. 75, 136, 448–449
In the late 1950s, Sekal created several intimate sculptures in which he deals with post-Cubist (Centaur and Lady, 1956) and imaginative inspirations (Bearing Figure, 1957). The sculpture Boy Blue Flower (1957) refers to Novalis's novel and in the context of Czech sculpture of the 1950s it represents an extraordinary act in its radicality and independence from any models.Klimešová M, in: Zbyněk Sekal, 2015, p. 142, 465 The existential symbols are drawings and sculptures of birds (Bird, 1957), but especially two suggestive sculptures evoking the suffering of war (Screaming Head, Dead Head, both from 1957).Klimešová M, in: Zbyněk Sekal, 2015, pp. 71–72, 463