Stanislav Vajce

WHITE UNICORN GALLERY IN KLATOVY

1. 2. - 6. 4. 2015

Retrospective exhibition marking the 80th birthday of this Klatovy native.

1 Feb. – 6 April 2015

Stanislav Vajce (1935), a native of Klatova, has been painting for more than five decades. He completed his studies at Prague’s Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, where he attended Alois Fišárek’s studio of monumental art, in the early 1960s – i.e., at a time of reinterpreting the world and looking at it differently. This new experience was expressed through an individual art form that made use of new approaches, materials, and tools. Vajce, who has lived in Germany since 1987, is one member of this important artistic generation.

His body of work includes not just paintings, collages, and assemblages, but also sculptures, ceramic art, and works of graphic design. Nevertheless, the exhibition presents him as a painter who, over the course of a hard-working life lived to the fullest, created paintings in which themes, contents, and motifs cyclically reappear, although his artistic style always reevaluates and transforms them to span a range of styles from lyrical expressionism to exaggerated action painting. Symbols and metaphors behave according to their own laws and give shape to specific meanings. Vajce’s paintings are meditations on the meaning of life, proof of an experienced existence and of emotions layered in time and space.

The exhibition originally hoped to offer a complete retrospective on the artist’s 80th birthday. Since many of his works are held in public and private collectoins, it is more an overview of thematic and chronogical chapters through which Stanislav Vajce can be presented as a distinctive artistic personality.

Milena Klasová, exhibition curator

Stanislav Vajce (1935), a native of Klatova, has been painting for more than five decades. He completed his studies at Prague's Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, where he attended Alois Fišárek's studio of monumental art, in the early 1960s – i.e., at a time of reinterpreting the world and looking at it differently. This new experience was expressed through an individual art form that made use of new approaches, materials, and tools. Vajce, who has lived in Germany since 1987, is one member of this important artistic generation.

His body of work includes not just paintings, collages, and assemblages, but also sculptures, ceramic art, and works of graphic design. Nevertheless, the exhibition presents him as a painter who, over the course of a hard-working life lived to the fullest, created paintings in which themes, contents, and motifs cyclically reappear, although his artistic style always reevaluates and transforms them to span a range of styles from lyrical expressionism to exaggerated action painting. Symbols and metaphors behave according to their own laws and give shape to specific meanings. Vajce's paintings are meditations on the meaning of life, proof of an experienced existence and of emotions layered in time and space.

The exhibition originally hoped to offer a complete retrospective on the artist's 80th birthday. Since many of his works are held in public and private collectoins, it is more an overview of thematic and chronogical chapters through which Stanislav Vajce can be presented as a distinctive artistic personality.

Milena Klasová, exhibition curator

Video Václav Vojta

Photos Jiří Strašek