Václav Turek

Dreslerová, D. – Stejskal, A. – Beneš, J. 2003: Historická krajina severního Prácheňska. – The Historic Landscape of North Prácheňsko. Písek: Prácheňské nakladatelství

His paintings were not created effortlessly, it was always a fair and persistent fight and it took a long time before he was willing to consider a painting finished. He almost tangibly inserted a piece of himself into each painting, which is why his work radiates a mysterious energy and feelings of downfall which is the case with his pieces after 1968. His practice was concluded prematurely in the second half of the 70s, when he stopped making art due to health and gradually also psychological problems caused by the hopeless situation the society was in. He died in January 1988 without living to see the political changes he had been waiting for his whole life.

In 1962 on the occasion of his first solo exhibition V. Rada wrote: “Václav Turek strives for expressing what he feels and what he has been through. They are experiences more internal than visual. I see his world, the world of his visions narrows but also focusses. Above all we are dealing with a man, his face and his fate. Everything is expressed with contemporary, low-cost and often persistent tools.”

Turek studied at the National Graphic School under J. Vodrážka and K. Müller, then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (AVU) in prof. Vlastimil Rada's studio (1945-1950). His generational colleagues were Oldřich Oplt, Josef Jíra, Ladislav Čepelák, Vladimír Tesař, Bohdan Kopecký and others. In the years of 1962-1965 he received an internal research fellowship at AVU, worked as an assistant in professor V. Rada's studio and prof. Karel Souček's atelier. From the beginning of the 70s until his death in 1988, he led a separate figure drawing class (the so-called “Evening Nude”) at AVU.

Václav Turek (1924– 1988) was a professional Czechoslovak painter, graphic artist and sculptor. He created figurative themes and landscape paintings, with a polarization of opinion between abstraction and modern Realism (arts). His work, reflecting the climactic period of classical European and Czech modern painters, is distinctively tinged with a delicate atmosphere of cultivated diversity of colour and light. His works are considered an important part of the evolution of Czech modern art.

Turek was born on 2 July 1924 in Šahy, Czechoslovakia to a family of construction engineers. They moved to Prague in 1937.