MIROSLAV ŠIMORDA

The painter and graphic artist Miroslav Šimorda, a native of the city of Brno, was born on March 29, 1923. Just like his good friends Jan Rajlich Sr., Václav Chad, Alex Beran and František Chmelař, he started his artistic career in 1939-1943 as a student of the School of Arts in Zlín. Among the most influential of his teachers were Richard Wiesner (painter and founder of the Zlín salons), the architect F. L. Gahura, as well as the sculptor Vincenc Makovský. Subsequently, Šimorda briefly worked at the school’s ceramic workshops. After the death of Václav Chad he left Zlín and attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague as a student of professors Jan Želibský and Karel Minář; however, he prematurely terminated his studies after two years. In the early 1950s he moved permanently to Brno, where he set up a studio, in which he worked for the next thirty years. Since the mid-1950s, Šimorda worked closely with the promotional department of the Brno Exhibition Centre, creating numerous professional designs of international expositions. He became member of the Association of Czechoslovak Graphic Artists and several years later became the founder of the Q Association in Brno, which used Šimorda‘s studio at Kounicova street as its meeting point. Though the activities of the association were soon banned, its members continued to meet.

During his career as an artist, Šimorda received numerous awards – the Grand Prix for the design of the Czechoslovak exhibition in Santiago de Chile, or the Irene und Peter Ludwigspreis award in Vienna. For his lifelong work, Miroslav Šimorda received the City of Brno Award in 2012.

The aim of this exhibition is to introduce its visitors to the two dominating tendencies in Šimorda‘s free art. The first part is devoted to a selection of works depicting landscapes, on which Šimorda had been focusing since the 1950s. Only a few landscapes have been preserved from his early years. Painting in the open air was part of the curriculum at the School of Arts in Zlín, and one of the oldest works in this exhibition, Autumn Landscape (1944), has been preserved from this period. The work was created in the nearby village of Hvozdná. One can feel its melancholic impression, observe the painter’s expression in an earthy harmony of intermingling impasto colours and his vigour, reflected in each brush stroke.

Quite to the contrary, the second part of the exhibition is introducing several aspects of his extensive painter’s work focused on city exteriors and houses, to which he devoted his whole life. Facing these works and silently observing them, we can see not only homes and apartments, but also the context of human coexistence that takes place inside - behind walls, in private. In 1976, Šimorda said the following about his work:
"A painter who just like me chooses at some stage of his career to intently exhaust all the possibilities he has to treat a single theme, in an effort to cope over and over with it inevitably discards description and irrelevant details in favour of delivering a concise and concentrated message. At the same time it enables him to get beneath the surface of things, find their inner sense. However, this may not necessarily weaken the bond that binds the artist to objective reality. For example, they square-shaped paintings mentioned earlier are replicas of a sort of walls, which are silent witnesses of the fates of the living and deceased residents of our city. "¹

Šimorda gradually refrained from capturing the mass of the townhouses in his paintings, which also influenced the character of his later works, in which he less used the layering and blending of colours. His gradual inclination to abstract painting is already captured in the triptych Records (1978), but something intangible can be significantly felt only since the 1990s - Vista (1995).

Miroslava Kupčíková
 



[1] VLADIMÍR, Čech, 1976. I am a city person. Brněnský večerník. Brno, p. 2.