The painter and glass artist Vladimír Kopecký oscillates between two poles in his work – between strict geometry and wild gestural expression. He applies both approaches in painting and working with glass.

            The distances and the poles exhibition focuses on Kopecký’s geometric position. It presents a selection of his works that attract their viewers with the purity of form and the perfect craftsmanship. Vladimír Kopecký has been developing the geometry in his work systematically since the 60’s of the last century, when he began to use the patterned industry linoleum as a basis for his paintings, on which he painted pillars of geometric blocks in perfect perspective. He often drew these heavy elements reminiscent of beams or pillars in pencil. Kopecký used thousands of lines to patiently cross-hatch every detail. His latest graphic works are surprisingly close to this meditative level. He gets them to the very point of the pop art, while remaining at the same starting point as in the 60’s. We can still see the pillars, however in modern lightweight virtual concept. It resonates in the regular layers and lines. Kopecký’s digitally processed graphics have something cosmic about them, as if their shapes spoke to us from a great distance.

            Vladimír Kopecký applied the geometric approach also in glass making. As one of the first in this country he began to work with glued sheets of glass to create an illusionary sense of depth and space. As in his paintings, the intersecting pillars appear in the sandblasted sheet walls as well. To express the same painting principles he can masterfully use glass and its properties as a sculptural material.

In Kopecký’s three-dimensional installations and sculptures there are complementary materials, conceptually based on the immutability, weight and stability, added to the glass – such as iron girders, rails, wooden sleepers or beams. Thus Kopecký is giving glass a new dimension; for once, he brings out its purity and optical properties, and sometimes he transforms it beyond recognition and uses it as a canvas for painting.

Vladimír Kopecký (1931) studied at the glass schools in Nový Bor and Kamenický Šenov. In 1949 he started in the studio of monumental painting and glass at the Prague Academy of Arts led by Josef Kaplický. Here, together with Adriena Šimotová and František Burant, he designed a mosaic for the world exhibition Expo 58 in Brussels, for which they later received a gold medal. At the turn of the 60’s Kopecký focused mainly on painted vases, made in thick layers of paint. Since 1967 he has been focusing on the painting, such as in the series of the linoleum paintings, culminating in the exhibition in 1970 at the Václav Špála Gallery, curated by Jindřich Chalupecký. He proposed monumental mosaics for the station in Havířov (1963), Electrotechnical Testing Institute in Prague (1969) and Želivka Water Treatment Plant (1971). During the 70’s and 80’s he gradually returned back to the glass, and used it in his paintings. He created a series of geometrically conceived glass objects with an illusive perspective, but also expressive images made with waste materials and thick layers of paint. In the 80’s and 90’s Vladimír Kopecký participated in several symposia at which he made his prime works. One of the most impressive works is the central work for the Czechoslovak pavilion at the exhibition Expo 92 in Seville. The large installation made of many sharp glass panes covered with layers of acrylic paint has not survived until now unfortunately. Between 1990 and 2008, Vladimír Kopecký led the glass studio at the Academy of Arts after Stanislav Libenský, and he educated the next generation of glass artists. Recently he has been busy with the expressive painting and glass work again, together with the creation of the digital geometric prints, for which he in 2014 won two awards in the 20th anniversary of the national contest Graphics of the year 2013.

Ján Gajdušek