The exhibition’s conceptual framework offers not only an overview of the transformations of a single material in the hands of a single sculptor, but also an intimate portrait of an artist whose work was inseparable from his love for his native region and for a quiet yet urgent form of expression. Nearly twenty years have passed since the completion of his work, yet the legacy of Vladimír Preclík continues to inspire the current generation of sculptors.

Chronologically, the exhibition shows how the wooden sculptures of the 1960s and 1970s—which were also marked by the censorship of the time—matured in the 1980s into works such as The Great Hideout (1984), The Great Sarcophagus (1985), Dependent on Touch (1986), and Flywheel with Memory (1987). In the 1990s, wood began to blend with metal, and found, discarded objects gave rise to metal installations in the spirit of Duchamp’s ready-mades and Kantor’s Manifesto of the Assemblage from 1963.

Preclík always took the vertical as his starting point, which he treated as a totem and supplemented with mechanisms reminiscent of mechanical machines or anti-machines. Touch was an important sense for him, one he often incorporated into the title of a sculpture. The so-called welded “bronze woods” from this period find their ultimate expression in large public sculptures.

Alongside sculpture, painting and drawing remained parallel branches, a permanent part of his artistic expression. He exhibited paintings as early as his student days in Hořice, even before his sculptures, and throughout his life he kept a daily sketchbook, in which—as in his sculptures—he sought one and the same thing: an austere yet personal account of the state of the soul, of his relationship to life, to home, and to God. This naturally led him to write books as well (Dřevěná knížka, 1988; Tiše se přemisťovati, 1989; Smírčí kameny, 1990). Preclík himself collected sculptural drawings ranging from the Cubists—from Otto Gutfreund to Hana Wichterlová.