Geometric Structures, Op Art, Kineticism (1960-1970s)

Structural abstraction, characterized by dark colours and the use of diverse raw materials, began to take off in the Czech environment at the beginning of the 1960s. At the time of its waning fame, another important chapter of Czech art began. At its beginning, it was a loose grouping of diverse authors who refused to present the morass of their time in their works. They were convinced that art, in the light of the latest scientific knowledge, was to extend human knowledge and the perception of the world and that it was possible, among other things, to come up with new explorations of so-called objective and essentially elementary forms of art such as the point, line, triangle, square and circle. Thus, their works have rid themselves of everything that could seduce the viewer to some literary interpretation and programmatically exclude or suppress the author's handwriting. The new stark forms of the paintings and objects shocked their audience the more, that in the Czech environment, unlike Poland and Hungary, radical geometric art was never accepted with much understanding. Now, more than half a century on from their inception, it turns out that these strange artworks are in fact full of exciting artistic imagination and that they are much more valued in the international context than the Czech informel that is for a foreign audience difficult to understand due to its "dark content".

One of the pioneers of geometric structures in the Czech lands was Zdeněk Sýkora, whose painting Black Lines from 1963 we can see here. This work falls into a relatively short, but for the author a key period: the created elements were placed into a chosen grid, which produced visually fascinating structures, which is what he called his paintings. The resulting appearance of these images was very surprising and became a precursor to the further development of Sýkora's work. In 1964, the artist started using so-called objective methods for building structures, for example, setting firm rules for combining individual elements. As a result, for the realization of his artistic aims, he was one of the first artists in the history of painting to use a computer as a working tool.