Zbyněk Sekal: A Private Matter
- EXHIBITION: Zbyněk Sekal: Private Matter | Insights into the Collections of the Olomouc Museum of Art
- DATES: July 1 – October 4, 2026
- VENUE: Museum of Modern Art, Gallery
- CURATORS: Olga Š. Staníková, Klára Jeništová
- TRANSLATION AND LANGUAGE EDITING: Zuzana Henešová
- INSTALLATION: Vlastimil Sedláček, Filip Šindelář, Radka Žáková
- GRAPHIC DESIGN: Kateřina Manková
- EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS: Denisa Tessenyi, David Hrbek
Visitors can view a cross-section of the work of sculptor, painter, and translator Zbyněk Sekal starting July 1, 2026, at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition Private Matter is primarily an attempt to open up the artist’s 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.
“Sekal’s work may seem quiet, sometimes even withdrawn. Yet—or perhaps precisely because of this—it has the ability to speak to viewers 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,” says curator Olga Š. Staníková.
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 sculptural work, 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—selected excerpts of which visitors can listen to—that form one of the key threads of this exhibition. They are not merely a commentary on the artwork, but a natural part of the installation,” adds Olga Š. Staníková.
Visitors can listen to the audio recordings through the provided headphones or use the audio guide in the Cabinet of Wonders app.
In addition to existentialism, Sekala was strongly influenced by Informel. 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.
This exhibition is made possible by a donation to the Olomouc Museum of Art from the estate of the artist’s wife, Christine Sekal.
Zbyněk Sekal
Zbyněk Sekal (1923–1998) is one of the most prominent figures in postwar Czech art. He was a sculptor, translator, and writer, but above all, he was a man for whom creation was a way of life. He created sculptures, hanging assemblages (i.e., composite images), and objects of various sizes (from wooden and copper boxes to jewelry). World War II had a profound impact on his life—he endured imprisonment and a concentration camp—and this experience left a deep imprint on his thinking and work. Consequently, one can observe in his work a tension between chaos and, at the same time, an effort to bring order to things. Following the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968, he emigrated to West Germany and settled permanently in Vienna in 1970.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)