Lot 15 D

With ‘Linien Nr. 102’, Zdeněk Sýkora, the most important representative of Czech Constructivism and a pioneer of computer-aided art, created an intensive work of impressive density. Bands of colour glide horizontally through the pictorial space in languid undulations – in their massiveness they could be described more as paths than lines. Their all-encompassing presence is unusual; they literally fill the pictorial space.
At the beginning of the 1970s, the artist’s style evolved to line paintings via the enlargement of abstract structures which he constructed with the aid of a computer. Using a random generator, Sýkora first specified the starting points of the lines, their width and colour. In the next step, he defined the lengths and directions of the tangents from which the arcs were constructed that determined the course of the lines. Finally, he calculated their points of intersection. During the entire construction of the picture, the artist adheres to the data randomly produced by the computer without any intervention or selection on his part. “Even a combination that initially seems uninteresting can lead to a result that surprises me. Chance enriches man: it prevents him from falling into stereotypes. With every painting, I end up being the one who is most shocked, even though I have a vague notion beforehand what might emerge. I find the greatest analogy for this kind of art in music. For a composer who writes the individual parts more or less separately, it must also be a great experience to hear the work played as a whole by all the instruments.” (Zdeněk Sýkora in an interview with Vít Petrjanoš, 1991, quoted from: www.zdeneksykora.com)