Zbyněk Sekal: A Private Matter

The exhibition A Private Matter at the Museum of Modern Art not only presents a cross-section of the work of Zbyněk Sekal (1926–1998), but is above all an attempt to open up his inner world to the viewer as a space of memory, anxiety, order, and silence. Alongside selected sculptures, assemblages, and containers, the exhibition also features the artist’s own words in the form of excerpts from diaries and personal reflections, which create an intimate portrait of the artist’s human presence. The exhibition has been made possible by a donation to the collection of the Olomouc Museum of Art from the estate of the artist’s wife, Christine Sekal.

Zbyněk Sekal’s artistic work is imbued with profound personal experience and existential anguish. He was an exceptionally focused and solitary man, scarred by war, imprisonment, and his time in a concentration camp. He coped with his experiences of extreme chaos by seeking order in the things around him and creating a new whole from their fragments. This principle permeates his entire body of work—from his early sculptures of the 1950s, through the hanging assemblages made of found objects and recycled materials from the 1960s, to the intricately and rigorously composed boxes, which he focused on intensively from the 1980s onward.

In addition to his work as a sculptor, Sekal devoted himself to drawing, collages, graphic design for book covers, and translations of challenging German philosophical and literary texts. At the same time, he wrote his own texts and kept diaries, which today offer a unique key to understanding his thinking and artistic work. It is precisely these diary entries that form one of the central themes of this exhibition—not merely as a commentary on his work, but as an integral part of it. They serve as the artist’s voice, which remains quiet yet compelling.

In addition to existentialism, Sekala was strongly influenced by Informel, and although he remained a distinctive maverick, his work placed him within the broader circle of postwar European art, which responded to the collapse of certainties and the search for a new language after the war. The need to shut himself off from the outside world and the pressure of the regime of the time led him to a form of internal exile even before his actual departure after 1968 and his subsequent settlement in Vienna. There he found his new studio, where he spent long hours working intently in solitude, surrounded only by his works and an endless supply of materials, and where, over the years, he built a protective microcosm for himself.

Sekal’s work may seem quiet, sometimes even withdrawn. Yet—or perhaps precisely because of this—it has the ability to speak to the viewer on a very personal level. It does not impose an interpretation or offer clear-cut answers. Rather, it creates a space where one can pause for a moment and enter into a state of focused silence. Perhaps this is where his work opens up the most: as a patient reassembly of the world from fragments, as an attempt to capture what would otherwise fall apart, and as a quiet yet urgent testimony to the human experience.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)