Ivan (Ivo) Sedliský
born in Ostrava on 14 May 1926 died in Prague on 19 March 1999
a leading Czech painter of the 20 th century (oil painting)
- born Ivan Kopřiva, the brother of the Czech graphic artist and typographer Milan Kopřiva, twice married (his first wife Božena, his second wife Dana)
- a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (1946-1952) under Professor Vratislav Nechleba, in the following years until 1960 he was his assistant
- his nephews are the twins Karel and Maxim Havlíček (1974), an award-winning Czech composer and an internationally renowned Czech-American “contemporary” artist
His work was mainly devoted to figurative compositions and he created many monumental works (a square metre or more in size). He became famous for his portraits of women, but also for his series of large-scale paintings featuring historical towns, world famous painters, actors, politicians and motor racing drivers. His striking technique and colouring set him apart from other artists and his distinctive style is easy to recognise. Among his generation he is the only painter to systematically develop monumental work. He composes his monumental paintings as frescoes or sgraffiti. He is a realist; his style can be characterised as symbolist realism, using a timeline from antiquity to modern science and technology to represent that science. He tries to capture all of this in a single monumental work. A timeless symbolist realism characterised by a clearly defined shape, solid line drawing and rich colour. He deliberately uses a sign, symbol or allegory as his subject. Ivan Sedliský’s work is unique even in a global context. Similarly to the work of Jan Zrzavý, the non-Cubist period of Josef Čapek, Antonín Procházka’s non-Cubist period and, of course, the purely Czech Josef Lada, you will not find a parallel in world painting for Ivan Sedliský either. In the 1960s and 1970s, as well as in the Czechoslovakia, his paintings were exhibited, for example, in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Algeria and Canada. His works can be found in galleries and private collections throughout Europe, Mexico and North America. His last posthumous exhibition comprising forty paintings was at Letovice Chateau in 2012.
Ivan Sedliský is one of the world’s most important portrait painters of the twentieth century.
Early work (1958-1965) Middle work (1966-1987) Late work (1988-1995)
