Zdeněk Sýkora - Linien Nr. 34 - image-1

Lot 634 D

Zdeněk Sýkora - Linien Nr. 34

Auction 1135 - overview Cologne
01.06.2019, 14:00 - Contemporary Art
Estimate: 150.000 € - 200.000 €
Result: 285.200 € (incl. premium)

Zdeněk Sýkora

Linien Nr. 34
1985

Oil on canvas. 150 x 150 cm. Framed. Signed and dated 'Sýkora 85' verso on canvas. Signed, dated, and titled 'Zdenek Sýkora, Nr. 34, 1985 Sýkora' verso on stretcher and with dimensions and artist's address stamp. - Traces of studio and minor traces of age.

Zdenek Sýkora, one of the most significant representatives of concrete art, commenced his artistic career as a landscape painter at the beginning of the 1950s. Based on this, he pursued impressionist and fauvist traditions in the following years - and found a role model in Henri Matisse in particular - in order to find his own way of realising the essence of natural motifs with an objective system of painting. Via the reduction of shapes and colours, he gradually arrived at geometric abstraction with a systematic composition: the structure-paintings. With these structures, the artist initially found an artistic solution for the relationship between shape and colour.
However, at the beginning of the 1970s, Sýkora embarked on a new creative process in which he focused on the contours of spaces in the form of a line, quasi as a detail of the previously created structures. Detached from the structural grid, the line-paintings allowed the artist more painterly freedom leaving a great deal of creative space for the element of chance. They are consistent further developments of the structure-paintings and the climax of his artistic work.
'Sýkora had not discovered the proximity to nature that he had sought from the very beginning in depictive landscape painting by his own, obviously subjectively guided hand. Only the structures invented by him on the basis of an objective and logical principle, but calculated by the computer and without the recognisable hand of the painter, were intrinsically more vivid than just the simple depiction of nature.' (Rouven Lotz, quoted in: Zdenek Sýkora , System und Kraft der Linie, exhib.cat. Emil Schumacher-Museum Hagen, Dortmund 2015, p.20).

NB

Certificate

The present work is registered in the Lenka Sýkorová and Zdenek Sýkora archive, Louny.

Provenance

Private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia

Exhibitions

Bottrop 1986 (Quadrat Bottrop, Josef Albers Museum), Zdenek Sýkora, Retrospektive, exhib.cat.no. 48 (label verso)