Jiří Valenta (artist)

At the end of the 1980s he was diagnosed with a malignant tumour. In 1990 and 1991 he visited Prague and met his mother and friends. He died in Cologne and is buried in the Břevnov Cemetery in Prague.

In 1978, Jiří Valenta felt that he was no longer able to express himself through painting, so he stopped painting and devoted himself to photography for the rest of his life. Linhartová suggests that in his case, the over-theorizing may have become an obstacle to the spontaneous process of creation. Until 1990, he made around 5,000 images, which he developed and saved as negatives, but only a small part of them were enlarged. His last drawings are followed by his earliest black and white photographs, a series of still lifes with white cups, with shadows tinted a light brown (chamois). He had some of them framed and hung them on the white-painted walls of his Cologne apartment, which gradually became a work of art itself, reflecting Valenta's obsession with purity. The following series of images, which zoom in on parts of the human body in great detail (Buttocks, 1979) or rose blossoms (Roses, 1979), have an overtly erotic subtext. Valenta continued to take photographs until 1991 and also created colourful, often informel compositions. "Just as in painting, where he wanted to reach the limit of the absolute, where form and perfection collided, in photography he wanted to reach the last possibility, beyond which nothing opens up anymore, because a full stop has been made."

Valenta has ceased to label the following works from the 1970s with titles and only assigns them a sequence in the Paintings series. They contain an allusion to a particular motif - Jacqueline Kennedy's feet, which Valenta spotted in a fashion magazine and converted into a flat sign. The twisted thumb disturbs the perfect composition and brings up feelings of humanity, tenderness and vulnerability. The cycle develops the artist's spiritual conception of the link between the corporeal and the ephemeral in the order of the world. The dominant colour is white, complemented by pencil drawing and accentuated by a fragment of an area of pure colour. Metallic elements are affixed to a ground of wood or Plexiglas to complement the irregular areas of transparent film, and white and coloured papers pasted in as a collage (Painting I-XXI, 1972-1975). The subject matter for the paintings consists of a large series of drawings, interconnected by repetitive marks transmitted through stencils, which are gradually altered and simplified to a final predominance of white. The purpose of the meditation that the painter conducts in the course of his conceptual work is the liberation and emptying of the interior and the attainment of absolute purity.

After the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia he went first to Vienna and then to Germany. In 1969 he settled in Hof Dodau near Eutin, in the studio of the Berlin gallerist J. Kilian. From there he moved to Plön, where he learned to make girdles. He exhibited in Toronto, Bochum and Sweden. In 1971, thanks to a one-year scholarship from the Emil Nolde Foundation, he worked in his North German home in Seebull. In 1972, he moved from Plön to Brühl and then to Cologne, where he was employed by the local municipality as a technical draughtsman from 1973 and participated in the preparation of the Cologne city plan. In the 1980s he travelled extensively (France, England, Italy, Holland, Africa).

Immediately after his involuntary emigration, during his stay in Dodau (October–November 1968), Valenta created a cycle of nine paintings, Homage to Master Theodoric, subtitled Nine Attempts to Suspend Man in Space. It was a reaction to his departure from the country to which he was tied by his roots and an expression of his personal connection to the leading Czech medieval master, who became for him at that moment an important emotional security and a necessary clue in the vastness of an unknown world. The depressing realisation that he is unable to influence the events that are taking place outside of him and without his input is expressed in the paintings from 1970 (Votive Plaque for St. Krapp, Votive Plaque for St. Lala, 1970), whose titles refer to Samuel Beckett's absurdist play Krapp's Last Tape. They sketch a space with a central perspective, the indifferent outlines of circular sections suggesting fragments of bodies. The golden metallic surface as a symbol of the divine presence and the rich blue and red colours may suggest an association with medieval paintings.

In 1963, he had his first solo exhibition of drawings at the Mánes Club, and in 1965 he exhibited his paintings and drawings in Brno. In the same year, he was selected along with five other young European artists for an exhibition at the Lambert Gallery in Paris (Cinque jeunes peintres dÉurope de l'Est). He participated in IV. Biennial at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, where the jury deliberately chose Czechoslovak artists who presented a distinct and authentic expression capable of standing up to international competition (J. Valenta, B. Dlouhý, A. Veselý, K. Nepraš, A. Kučerová, R. Fila). In the following years he exhibited at the Mánes Gallery in Prague and Regional Gallery of Highlands in Jihlava and in 1967 he was accepted into the Czechoslovak Art Union. Together with architect M. Hrubý, Valenta prepared the reconstruction of the Chapel of St. John of Nepomuk in the village of Stáj, but after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia the reconstruction was never realized.

From 1951 to 1953 he attended the Higher School of Arts and Crafts in Prague. In his second year he received an exemption as an exceptional talent and at the age of seventeen was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague without graduation. In 1953-1959 he studied with Prof. Miloslav Holý and Prof. Karel Souček. His classmates included František Mertl, Milan Ressel and Bedřich Dlouhý. During his studies, he became close to his progressively oriented classmates, who, through two unofficial studio exhibitions called Confrontation, brought the European Informel to the Czech environment in 1960 in a specific form. The group put together by Jan Koblasa included Aleš Veselý, Zbyšek Sion, Zdeněk Beran, Antonín Málek and Antonín Tomalík. The first Confrontation, to which Koblasa invited the printmaker Vladimír Boudník, took place on 16 March 1960 in Valenta's studio Na Palmovce; the second Confrontation, also with Boudník's participation, took place on 30 October in Aleš Veselý's studio in Prague, Žižkov.

Early in his career, he touched fleetingly on figuration in paintings that deliberately evoked raw primitive art or children's drawings (Girl with a Ball, 1959, Venus, 1959). In the late 1950s and early 1960s he turned to structural painting. The relief structure and colour of his paintings, reduced to natural light ochres, sands, creams and greenish tones, were directly inspired by the rocks in the Kokořín valley, where they had taken trips together as students (Collage VIII, 1961). To create a surface of relief, he mixed sand first into the paint and later into the Acronex synthetic resin. Pieces of textile pasted onto the canvas as rectangular and circular fields in the abstract Collage series testify to Valenta's "nostalgia for order" and his need to bring geometric elements to the informel image that would overcome the randomness of structural confusion.

Valenta's artistic expression tended towards contemplation, which also asserted itself through colour, first as a luminous background in the series of paintings Triptych (1959) and later as colourful and luminously opalescent circular centres in the series Portraits of Slowly Increasing Processes (1962-1963). The portraits were Valenta's records of various situations, concrete things or even a conversation. The striated lines of the circular patterns in the surface of the relief paint suggest movement and internal tension, but the imperfect forms and shapes are only phases of an open-ended process. The change in the painting's lava-like texture towards a dull and slightly pinkish synthetic paste is related to the transition to organic structures in the following cycle of Synthetic Tissues (1963-1964), where the formations become isolated as white circles surrounded by a shabby structural painting. Valenta's painterly development has an internal logic from which he does not deviate, even in the mid-1960s, when many of his generational comrades returned to figuration. Valenta continued his cycle of abstract Portraits until his emigration in 1968 (Portrait of a Situation III, 1965, Portrait of a Black Egg, 1965, Portrait of a Blind Young Man (1965-1966), Portrait of the Annunciation, 1966, Small Portrait of a Voice II, 1966–67).

Valenta's school paintings are dominated by silvery still lifes and grey-green landscapes. The painter's private work expresses the defiance and existential scepticism common to a whole generation of artists studying at the Academy in the 1950s (Ghost of the Slain, 1959). Already during his studies he found a source of inspiration in the art brut of Jean Dubuffet, the material compositions of A. Tàpies or the Burri´s collages made of burlap (Sacchi), but the essence of his work is spiritual and grounded in theoretical considerations.

Jiří Valenta (6 August 1936, Prague - 11 July 1991, Cologne) was a Czech painter, printmaker and photographer. After the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia he emigrated to Germany. From 1972 until his death he lived in Cologne.