Zbyněk Sekal (12 July 1923 – 24 February 1998) was a Czech sculptor, painter and translator. During World War II he was imprisoned for three years in the Mauthausen concentration camp. After the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, he emigrated to Austria. Already in the mid-1960s, he was considered one of the most important and distinctive Czech sculptors.
Life
1923–1968
In 1934–1941 he graduated from the Real Gymnasium and the Business Academy and then worked briefly as an intern at the Topič publishing house. Before the war, he was already involved in the activities of the Comité de la democratie de España and later worked in the left-wing anti-Nazi National Movement of Working Youth. At the beginning of the war, he tragically lost his father. In 1941, at the age of eighteen, he was arrested for distributing leaflets, imprisoned in Pankrác Prison in Prague, in the Small Fortress in Terezín, and for the next three years until the end of the war in Mauthausen concentration camp, where he worked for a year in a stone quarry. In the concentration camp, he became close to the Polish painter Marian Bogusz, and later, as a scribe in an office, he perfected his German, from which he later translated very difficult philosophical texts.
In 1945, he was accepted to study at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague in the studio of prof. František Tichý and made friends with his classmates Mikuláš Medek, Stanislav Podhrázský, Josef Lehoučka and Zdeněk Palcr. He rejoined the Spořilov Surrealist group, which had been formed by his friends of the same generation at the beginning of the war. On a trip to Paris organized for students in 1947 by prof. Václav Nebeský, he visited the International Surrealism Exhibition at the Galerie Maeght several times. He was strongly impressed by the rawness of the installations with reminiscences of war and camps and the primitivizing paintings (in the Foyer de l'Art Brut ) by Jean Dubuffet. He also made the acquaintance of Toyen, who was preparing paintings for an exhibition in Prague at Topič Salon. Shortly before his trip to Paris, at the age of 24, he married the painter Ludmila Purkyňová, with whom he had a son, Jan.
He continued his studies at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague under prof. František Muzika and in the studio of prof. Emil Filla, but in 1950 he left the school without a diploma to avoid politicized state exams. After leaving school, he belonged to the so-called Libeň circle of Bohumil Hrabal and was the author of the generational statement " Postscript or Abdication" (1951), which was first published in samizdat as part of Hrabal's book The Tender Barbarian (Petlice edition).
In 1951–1953 he was employed as a publicity officer at the General Directorate of Meat Industry and as a literary editor at the Political Literature Publishing House (later Svoboda publishing house). In the winter of 1952/1953 he completed his military service. In a futile attempt to save his broken marriage, he moved to Bratislava to join his wife, and in the following years until 1958 lived there alone, working as a translator from German and an art editor. However, he maintained written and personal contact with Prague friends (Mikuláš Medek, Egon Bondy) and sent them manuscripts of his translations. At that time, he was interested in Russian pre-revolutionary thinkers (Berdyaev, Shestov) and especially in existentialism and phenomenology (Nietzsche, Husserl, Schopenhauer, Freud, Jaspers, Heidegger), Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse and Ludwig Feuerbach. He was invited as a guest to the first exhibition of Group Máj in 1957, participated in the second exhibition in 1958 as a member and returned to Prague. Sekal joined Group Máj because of his friends, but he did not identify with the group's program. In the 1950s, under the influence of reading, he felt an "inner emigration", remained a solitaire in his work, and long before the August 1968 occupation, he was already thinking of leaving for Austria.
The following year he travels to Moscow and Leningrad (1959) and in 1961, with sculptors Zdeněk Palcr and Miloslav Hájek, to Warsaw and Gdańsk. A classmate of Zdeněk Palcr from prof. Wagner's studio at VŠUP Alina Szapocznikow introduced him to the sculptor Barbara Pniewska, whose material work was the inspiration for the first of his assemblages, which he called Assembled Pictures. In the early 1960s he was close to Informel and was one of the initiators of the Imaginative and Structural Abstraction movement, but he differed in his strictly intellectual approach to his work. In 1961 he married for the second time to Helena Waldvogel, with whom he had a son, Ondrej.