Chinatown, New York
Václav Požárek
OOF
Orient15 Orient is honored to present OOF, a solo exhibition by Václav Požárek. The exhibition marks Požárek’s first presentation with the gallery and the first exhibition in the United States dedicated to the artist’s work. Centered on three new large-scale sculptures produced specifically for the gallery’s Walker Street space, OOF (“One or Five”) also brings together sculptures, drawings, and works on paper spanning multiple decades of the artist’s nearly sixty-year career. By placing these newly realized works in relation to earlier examples, the exhibition proposes a unique new configuration while offering an introduction to a body of work that has long held a singular position within European sculpture. Požárek’s practice encompasses a wide range of media and disciplines— sculpture, assemblage, drawing, photography, collage, typography, furniture, and book design—and is often described as a compound of Constructivism, Concrete art, Minimalism, and Conceptualism. Rigorous in conception and design, his works are patently hand-wrought and at times deliberately perfunctory in their execution. By playing these various media, methods, and stylistic registers against one another, Požárek subtly complicates and deflates the formal codes of twentieth-century abstraction while opening a space of playful indeterminacy between the autonomous sculpture, the utilitarian object, and the exhibition apparatus. Václav Požárek (b. 1940, Budweis, Czechoslovakia—now České Budějovice, Czech Republic) lives and works in Bern, Switzerland. He was born into the family of a factory owner and grew up in postwar Czechoslovakia under the constraints of the socialist regime. As a young man he apprenticed as a toolmaker in Pilsen from 1954 to 1957. Beginning in 1959, he completed two years of mandatory military service in what is now Slovakia. During this period he developed a strong interest in typography and graphic design. At the age of twenty-two he returned to Budweis and worked as a typographer and technical editor for the Růže publishing house from 1961 to 1964. In 1965, Požárek moved to Prague, where he studied film direction at the Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) before leaving to continue his work in typography. He subsequently worked as a graphic designer for the Prague-based theatre group Semafor, designing posters and other printed material. In 1968 Požárek planned to travel with the theatre group to Paris, but the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia abruptly changed these plans. Having procured a visa, passport, he left the country independently, stopping in Nuremberg where he sold his return ticket to Prague and used the funds to continue on to London. After short stays in London and Paris he settled in Bern, Switzerland, where he obtained a residency permit and worked as a graphic designer at Atelier Jacquet, producing advertising and commercial design work, including campaigns for watch companies and other products. From 1969 to 1971 Požárek pursued an education in fine art at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg. Developing an interest in American Minimalist sculpture—particularly the work of Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and Donald Judd—he moved to London to study at Saint Martin’s School of Art from 1971 to 1973. There he worked under the influential British sculptor Anthony Caro and began developing the stylistic rudiments of his mature work. Since the early 1970s Požárek has lived and worked in Bern, Switzerland, where from 1980 to 2005 he taught at the Bern Academy of the Arts. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMCO) in Geneva, Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Bündner Kunstmuseum in Chur, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, and Kunsthaus Glarus, as well as galleries such as Galerie Francesca Pia in Zurich and Galerie Mitterrand in Paris. His works are held in major public collections, including the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. OOF is accompanied by Rollingroll, an artist's book in an edition of 300, featuring a series of Požárek’s recent colored pencil drawings. The publication was produced in collaboration with E.BS and realized by Viaindustriae.