VLADIMÍR SUCHÁNEK | PRINCE OF CZECH LITHOGRAPHY | 25. 2. — 6. 4. 25
The Czech Gallery of Modern Art would like to invite you to the exhibition Vladimír Suchánek | Prince of Czech Lithography. Vladimír Suchánek (February 12, 1933 – January 25, 2021) was one of the most important Czech artists of the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries. His color lithographs have achieved recognition all over the world. An exceptional man of many talents and abilities, an academic painter, graphic artist and illustrator, who also entered the consciousness of the widest audience as a creator of postage stamps and a master of graphic exlibris.
If we are looking for the symbolic point of the beginning of Suchánek's artistic expression, it is necessary to go back to 1965, when the graphic artist, after several years of living with his family in Mariánské Lázně, permanently moved to Prague and soon acquired his own lithographic press. In lithography, a printing from stone, Suchánek discovered new possibilities for the traditional technique, which also fully suited his taste for the perfection of craftsmanship. His perfect mastery of washed color lithography, where the image is created by washing out lithographic ink directly on the stone, placed Suchánek among the leading figures of Czech graphic art at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. The nature of this specific variant of lithography, which brings the resulting print closer to a watercolor painting, led Suchánek to develop a unique artistic expression that is characteristic of his graphic art. His mastery of the extraordinarily laborious but beautiful lithographic technique earned him the title of "Prince of Czech Lithography".
The leaves created since the early seventies increasingly transport the viewer to a world of fantasy and illusion, a world dominated by a special nostalgia, in which the artist plays with metaphor and symbol. A typical subject has become the female figure, understood as a symbol of a being who is vulnerable and fragile, but at the same time strong and full of emotions. These elegant and mysterious figures usually move in another dimension, somewhere on the edge of dream and reality. The feeling of being torn from space and time is emphasized by the deliberately used attributes – masks, fans, skraboški or shells and shells twisting into endless fantastic spirals.
Vladimír Suchánek studied at the Faculty of Education of Charles University in Prague (1952–54) with professors Cyril Bouda, Karel Lidický and Martin Salcman and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (1954–60) in the graphic department of professor Vladimír Silovský. His work is an exceptional part of Czech modern graphic art of the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. During his life, he organized 174 solo exhibitions in the Czech Republic and abroad, and is represented in the collections of the National Gallery in Prague, Albertina Wien, Rockford Art Museum and in many other public and private collections in our country and abroad.
In addition to Vladimír Suchánek's color lithographs, our Gallery also exhibits a lithographic stone with a drawing that was never printed on paper during Suchánek's lifetime. Thanks to the great printer Petr Korbelář, and thanks to the heirs of the copyright, a limited edition of only 100 numbered pieces of the work entitled Memory of Summer was created on the occasion of our exhibition.
