Abstract artist dies at 91

By Tomáš Vlček

For the Post

Known for abstract painting and his pioneering use of computers, Zdeněk Sýkora died of natural causes July 12 at the age of 91.

Now with artwork on display at some of contemporary art's most high-profile venues, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and Vienna's Museum of Modern Art (MUMOK), Sýkora came from humble beginnings in the town of Louny, west Bohemia, where he was born, lived all his life and died.  

For all of the 1950s, Sýkora traveled with his easel through the countryside near his home, trying to capture his feelings from nature through painting. During this period, he moved from Realism through Impressionism to Fauvism. By the end of the decade, he started to doubt his course, feeling the formal simplicity of his paintings was moving him farther away from nature itself.

His doubts were affirmed by a visit to the St. Petersburg's Hermitage in 1959, as he viewed a collection of paintings by Matisse. He was impressed by the logic of Matisse's development, and continued his own path toward the autonomous laws of painting, abandoning nature. Sýkora began with renewed vigor on a series of paintings composed of larger surfaces of color. Titled Zahrady (Gardens), from their predominant subject matter, they displayed his growing desire for greater control over the painterly process resulting in the transformation of the original organic forms into geometrical ones.

Compositions no longer emerged in the presence of a natural subject, but in the studio. At the end of this process stands the painting Šedá struktura (Gray Structure). After its completion, Sýkora again felt he had lost his way. However, after longer observation of the canvas, he realized the white dots came close to replicating the light shimmering on the water's surface, and that the painting was in fact a transposed expression of what he had hoped to achieve in earlier Impressionist works.

The qualities of structure - its divisible character and the ability of the basic elements to become isolated from one another or by contrast linked into new wholes - were now seen as the autonomous life of the painting. As for the structure itself, Sýkora defined it as an organic whole built from selected rules. His innovation was in grounding the relations between the elements in a combinatory principle.

Working with mathematician Jaroslav Blažek, Sýkora developed an original system that, as early as 1964, made use of a computer for calculating selected inputs. Sýkora thus became one of the first artists to deliberately involve a computer in his work. In the early 1970s, after modifications to his own system, Sýkora discovered in one of the paintings an unexpected inspiration: a contour line at the boundary of several elements. The expressive possibilities of the line began to attract him.

In his linear paintings, Sýkora came to realize that randomness was a far more natural method of liberation from painterly convention than programming. The line in his paintings, with its freedom of movement, also corresponds more closely to the sensations of open space that the artist experienced traveling through the countryside. It is up to the painter whether its theme will consist of many short lines of a similar width or a contrast of a small number of longer lines with varied widths, whether they would begin in random locations within the format or all would ensue from a single point. He can also influence color of the lines. On the basis of this idea, the artist then sets the rules. The system develops gradually with every painting having its beginning in the previous one and the future painting in the present one - as in nature.

For his new themes, Sýkora generally tested them in smaller formats before expanding them into 2-square-meter formats. The first large-format realization in this linear period is the four-part canvas Linie č. 24 (Lines No. 24), later titled Poslední soud (The Last Judgment), which he worked on for an entire year and is today housed at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

The nature that Sýkora originally abandoned in his paintings returned in the endless organic tissue of relations between structural elements. This vitality is derived from the joint activity of the systematic and the random.

"I already know that all the while I've been working with lines, I've actually returned to nature again," Sýkora said before his death. "Even though the approaches are completely idiotically complicated and rational and cold, even with that kind of system, I still end up doing even freer things like those proper to nature, as if we were brothers."

Sýkora is survived by his wife, Lenka. The Museum Kampa has organized a small tribute exhibition and a memorial service July 20. The exhibition runs through July 31.

- Tomáš Vlček is the director of the National Gallery's Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art. He can be reached at news@praguepost.com.