Peter Oriešek (28 August 1941 – 18 October 2015) was a Czech sculptor, medallist, painter and teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.
Life
Peter Oriešek was born on 28 August 1941 in Dolná Súča, Slovak Republic. He studied at the Secondary School of Art Industry in Bratislava (prof. Ľudovít Korkoš) and in 1960–1966 at the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Prague, in the sculpture studios of prof. Jan Kavan and Josef Malejovský.
After graduation he was a freelance sculptor. He exhibited independently for the first time in 1969 and then only since the late 1980s. The sculptural and drawing work of Peter Oriešek brought a completely new and unique perspective to the Czech art scene. His original artistic expression, which very sharply interprets the situation of man in the middle of the world, has its origin in the unfavourable social atmosphere in the country occupied for twenty years by Soviet troops. The "cruelty of truth" is not an art for its own sake in his works, but restores the form to its original and, in the historical context, legitimate sense of making it present, visible and objectified. It expresses sensibility, existential anxiety and the irrational situation of life.
Since 1995, he has been a teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, and since 1999 also at the VŠUP.
He was a member of the Association of Medal Artists, a founding member of the groups Tolerance and Lipany (1989), member of the Mánes Union of Fine Arts (1990) and the civic association Figurama (2001). He died in Prague on 18 October 2015. His wife Petra Oriešková was a prominent Czech academic painter.
Work
Sculpture
Peter Oriešek graduated at a time when the domestic scene was moving away from abstract art and a space was opening up for brilliant draughtsmen who were absorbing the impulses of Pop Art, Hyperrealism, and especially the broad current of New Figuration associated with a renewed interest in physicality. In his early sculptural works, expressive exaggeration is evident (Male Figure, 1965, Dead Horse, 1970s), but in his later work, despite the harshness of his expression, he adheres to realistic modelling. The sheer materiality of the human and animal figures, more vital than the actual cast body, is often obscured by a fanciful polychromy (Figure, 164 cm, 1969). The sculptures, cast in transparent artificial resin, offer an insight into the interior with an expressive colour confusion of viscera (Figure, h. 166 cm, 1968, Pillow, 1968–1969, Birth, 1969). The existential theme of disgust, which has undergone the alienating lessons of pop art, is pushed to an ironic position in these sculptures.
His major works from the early 1970s are several variants of Anatomy of Silence (1970, GASK collection), created as polychromed assemblages of biomorphic abstract shapes in artificial resin, on a panel with a woman's head.
In the early 1970s, inspired by a trip to Greece, he created sculptural compositions loosely referencing Minoan culture and the mythical Minotaur. However, the way in which Oriešek recalls the Greek mythical perception of the world, embedded in the foundations of European civilization, points to the ways in which this tradition was carried over during the Renaissance and Mannerism. Apart from ancient sculpture, his major influences were Michelangelo, Giambologna and Adrian de Vries.
The main core of his work, however, are sculptures that come from the world of inner imagination and dream visions. Like some of Karel Pauzer's sculptures, Oriešek's phantasmatic creatures are metaphorical representations of the animal nature of man (Animals, 1987–89). Bodies with taut musculature are replete with physiological processes beneath a shockingly naked surface. The animal figures inspire terror with their exaltation and recall the deceptive mutability of a world dominated by aggression, anger, psychological coercion and helpless defiance. Oriešek's scenes of passion and destruction draw the viewer in with their narrativity, depicting stories that resemble dreamlike images. The author intended them to express his incipient alienation from his surroundings and the absurdity of an existentialist conception of existence or an anxiety fed by inner despondency. (Anatomy of Silence, 1970, GASK)