SLAVOJ KOVAŘÍK

Slavoj Kovařík 1923–2003
"I Always Loved Nights“
Selected Works
 
A former student of the School of Arts in Zlín (1939-1941), the painter, graphic artist and stage designer Slavoj Kovařík (1923-2003) is one of the most important artists of the second half of the 20th century in Central Moravia. In the 1950s, he primarily focused on painting landscapes and everyday still lifes. However, he treated traditional painters‘ motifs in a distinctive fashion, following the interwar production of his great idols - especially Pablo Picasso, Emil Filla and Oscar Domíguez, whom he personally met in 1947. Today, the painter's remarkable inclination towards the treatment of simple motifs using ornamental signs is perceived as a significant contribution to the development of Czech post-war art.

In the 1960s, Kovařík's creative energy spread out in several directions. Already at the beginning of the decade, we see a growing interest in civilization and the city in general. In the extensive loose cycle of oil paintings titled Cities (1960-1963), inspired by his native city of Olomouc, the painter transformed its panorama into a vibrating network of horizontal and vertical lines and soon started to portray the city as a mysterious labyrinth consisting of overlapping planes. By 1963, his work had reached the very limit of the then topical lyrical geometric abstraction. However, around 1965, Kovařík‘s interest in towns was also reflected in other facets of his work. In his paintings of "sand plots" and "junkyards" he responded to the wave of material abstraction, and from there the painter's interest was directed towards poster walls representing the "information heart" of urban culture. In the second half of the 1960s and in the first half of the 1970s, Kovařík created a series of collages, décollages and assemblages that are unique in Czech art, which – complemented by his works from the 1950s – form the core of the exhibited collection. In the creative period that followed and lasted until the end of his life, he devoted himself to lyrical abstraction, based on his observations of natural events. The most recent retrospective of his works took place at the Museum of Modern Art in Olomouc twenty years ago.

Ladislav Daněk