Miroslav Střelec / On the surface and in space

Miroslav Střelec (5 November 1943, Olomouc – 10 February 2014, Prague), a graphic artist in the fields of applied and fine arts, typographer, and designer, was one of the most prominent and inspiring figures in the artistic and public life of Olomouc from 1968, when he returned to the city of his birth after completing his military service. Nevertheless, recognition of his extensive work was a long time coming. After several earlier exhibitions of a somewhat intimate nature (1972, Olomouc; 1974 and 1978, Brno; 1985 and 2009, Olomouc), the idea of organising Střelec’s first retrospective exhibition was seriously considered by Pavel Zatloukal, his former colleague and the director of the Olomouc Museum of Art, in 2013. However, during the preparation of the exhibition and catalogue, which corresponded to his significance not only within the Olomouc art scene but also beyond it, the author passed away. We are now repaying our debt in order to perform a fitting evaluation of Střelec’s extensive work.

From 1960 to 1964, he studied free and applied graphics at the State School of Applied Arts in Uherské Hradiště. This was followed by a brief stint at the theatre in Tábor, where he worked as a designer. The contribution Střelec made to the visual style of the Olomouc Regional Gallery of Fine Arts, the predecessor of today’s Olomouc Museum of Art, where he worked from 1968 to 1988, is of fundamental importance. During the same period, through the public service of the Czech Fine Arts Fund, known as “Dílo”, he realised a number of permanent and temporary exhibitions (Flora Olomouc Exhibition Centre), a number of objects, and three-dimensional modifications of building interiors and exteriors. He elevated graphic design to a spatial game. In 1988, he went freelance and focused more on working together with architects and corporate design. From 1995, he collaborated with the graphic designers Jiří Mach and Roman Přidal, who converted Střelec’s drawings of logos, uniform visual styles, free graphics, and architecture into digital form.

 Between 1968 and 2010, he designed something like two hundred posters and poster templates, three hundred protective company logos, pictograms, design manuals, and other forms of visual communication in the field of applied graphics. He created numerous graphic designs for catalogues, exhibition invitations, and other types of smaller printed material (e.g. record sleeves or industrial packaging). We could also count over a hundred designs for the interiors and exteriors of public and private buildings. Sporadically, he also devoted himself to free creation, which today includes a collection of ink drawings from 1976 and a collection of large-format colour serigraphs from the early 21st century.

In 1997, Střelec lost a significant part of his archive during the floods, which today makes it impossible to reconstruct his work faithfully. Nevertheless, the exhibition provides insights into all the areas of his creative work, as does the catalogue. In addition to two art historical essays (by Martin Fišr and Martina Mertová) and one memoir (Pavel Zatloukal), it provides biographical information and the most comprehensive selection to date of his posters, logos, and significant architectural works, including a rigorously compiled list of exhibitions and literature (Ladislav Daněk).

Within Czech applied art, Střelec stands out not only for his poster designs, but also for his ability to expand graphic designs into three dimensions and, conversely, to bring the third dimension back to a two-dimensional plane. The characteristic interplay of surface and space and their blurring or, conversely, their concretisation in a specifically used graphic shorthand makes his work innovative and unique.

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