Vladimír Vašíček

Vladimír Vašíček (29 September 1919 – 29 August 2003) was a Czech painter, and one of the pioneers of Czech modern and abstract painting after the Second World War.

Vladimír Vašíček is one of the foremost representatives of non–figurative painting in the Czech republic. His artistic production spans the second half of the 20th century. The artist lives and works in his birthplace Svatobořice – Mistřín, a village in southern Moravia situated near a small town Kyjov, about 60 km from Brno.

The beginnings of Vašíček's artistic career were delayed by World War II – he could enter the Academy of Fine Arts only after the Liberation of the country. Having finished his studies he returned to his native region, where he founded his family and built a studio. In the hard days of totalitarian regime he persisted in his search for modern artistic expression and was trying to keep his artistic freedom and remain independent from the doctrine of the so-called socialistic realism.

Together with his friends, Moravian painters Kubíček, Matal and Vaculka, he searched for the possibilities of concentrated expression accompanied by stalized subjects and their transformation based on fauvist, cubist, futuristic, and particularly Orphist incentives. He took his inspiration from the classics of modern painting, mainly the work of František Kupka.

From 1960 he produced non–figurative paintings, in the beginning with quite a variable artistic form, which later became stabilized in two main lines, antipodal in a certain way and built on common aesthetic principle. It was based on the expression of the dynamism of life, sensualistic relation to reality and a harmosation principle dominating the whole of the painting.

Vašíček reacted to the topical incentives of world art, for instance by increased interest in the expression value of the surface structure of the painting matter, by return to the principles of geometric abstraction, the Freedom of Tashist painting and spontaneity of gestic art, transforming all of these incentives into his own individual version rooted in the world of the artist's original thinking. Vašíček's paintings are conceived as a paraphrase of nonmaterial phenomena, energy, natural forces, physical and biological processes – of events in which man takes part as well.

The artist sees the surrounding world on the basis of both exact facts verified by science, and through his own perception and experience. For him it represents a firm system ruled by intrinsic logic and harmony. An antipode to this feeling of ceritude in the unrest of the soul, the chaos of human heart. The two components of existence come together in the ambivalent Being. Together with Nicolaus Cusanus the painter perceives it as absolute being that has resulted from the Creator's utterly wise project.

Vašíček's paintings reflect their author's philosophical vision, hisperception of universal truths, attempts to integrate incompatible polarities. However, they are deeply rooted in the experience of the simplest wonders of nature and the poetry of the fields, meadows and gardens of the sunny south of Moravia.

Josef Maliva, 1993

Vladimír Vašíček created actively until his last day (August 29, 2003).

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