72 Walker Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10013
(Entrance on Cortlandt Alley between Walker and Canal)
Open Wednesday-Saturday, 12-6pm
Václav Požárek
OOF
15 Orient
March 20th - May 1st
Opening Reception;
Friday, March 20th, 6-9pm
15 Orient is honored to present OOF, a solo exhibition by Václav Požárek. The exhibition marks Požárek’s first show with the gallery and the first exhibition in the United States dedicated to the artist’s work.
Centered on three new large-scale sculptures produced specifically for the gallery’s Walker Street space, OOF ("One or Five") also brings together sculptures, drawings, and works on paper from multiple decades of the artist’s nearly sixty year career. Placing these newly realized works in relation to earlier examples, the exhibition represents a new and unique proposition while offering an introduction to a body of work that has long occupied a distinctive position within European sculpture.
Pozarek’s practice encompasses a variety of media and disciplines (sculpture, assemblage, drawing, photography, collage, typography, furniture and book design) and is characterized by a style that's been described as a compound of constructivism, concrete art, minimalism, and conceptualism. Rigorous in their conception and design, his works are patently hand-wrought and at times even perfunctory in their execution. Playing these various media, methods and stylistic registers against one another, Požárek subtly complicates and deflates the formal codes of twentieth-century abstraction and opens up a space of playful indeterminacy between the autonomous sculpture, the utilitarian object, and the exhibition apparatus.
Václav Pozarek (b. 1940, Budweis, Czechoslovakia, now České Budějovice, Czech Republic) lives and works in Bern, Switzerland. He was born into the family of a factory owner and grew up in postwar Czechoslovakia under the constraints of the socialist regime. As a young man he apprenticed as a toolmaker in Pilsen from 1954 to 1957.
Beginning in 1959 he completed two years of mandatory military service in Slovakia. During this period he developed a strong interest in typography and graphic design. At the age of twenty-two he returned to Budweis and worked as a typographer and technical editor for the Růže publishing house between 1961 and 1964.
In 1965, Pozarek moved to Prague where he studied film direction at the Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) before leaving to continue his work in typography. He was contracted as a graphic designer for the Prague based theatre group Semafor, where he designed posters and other printed material.
In 1968 Pozarek planned to travel with the theater group to Paris, but the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia abruptly changed these plans. Having procured a visa, passport, and a bit of money, he left the country independently, stopping in Nuremberg where he sold his return ticket to Prague and used the funds to continue on to London. After short stays in London and Paris he settled in Bern, Switzerland, where he obtained a residency permit and worked as a graphic designer at Atelier Jacquet, producing advertising and commercial design work, including campaigns for watch companies and other products.
From 1969 to 1971 Pozarek sought out an education in fine art at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg. Developing an interest in American minimalist sculpture– specifically the work of Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and Donald Judd– he subsequently moved to London to study at Saint Martin’s School of Art from 1971 to 1973. Here, he worked under the influential British sculptor Anthony Caro and began developing the stylistic rudiments of his mature work.
Since the early 1970s Pozarek has lived and worked in Bern, Switzerland, where, from 1980 to 2005 he taught at the Bern Academy of the Arts. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMCO) in Geneva, Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Bündner Kunstmuseum in Chur, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, and Kunsthaus Glarus, as well as galleries such as Galerie Francesca Pia in Zurich and Galerie Mitterrand in Paris. His works are held in major public collections, including the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.