Ladislav Zívr

Ladislav Zívr (1909-1980) is undoubtedly one of the most important representatives of Czech modern art. As a sculptor, he tried to use all the stimuli that the European avant-garde came up with - from cubism to surrealism, civilism to the imaginative abstraction of the 1960s - while not forgetting the timeless values he appreciated, for example, in ancient Egyptian sculptures or prehistoric monuments.

Zívre's work developed in parallel with that of such sculptural figures as Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Laurens, Hans Arp and Henri Moore, but in the process had to be severely challenged by adverse political conditions. The artist's greatest achievement was his participation in the 1962 Venice Biennale, but the agreed inclusion of the sculptures in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum in New York had already been thwarted by the Communist regime.
Zívr was characterised, among other things, by his concentrated work with material, which in his case was most often baked clay. In this way, he sculpturally valorised the family tradition of the potter's craft. He aimed for simplicity and fullness of shapes, and he also used colour to enhance their effect, as the important Czech sculptor Otto Gutfreund had done before him.

All these qualities stand out in the book about Ladislav Zívr thanks to the extraordinarily concise photographs by Ondřej Polák. However, the archival photographs also map numerous works that have not survived. The author of the book, Jaromír Typlt, traces the changes in the sculptor's work over more than five decades and enlivens the individual chapters with numerous quotations from the artist's mostly unpublished diaries. An annotated inventory of Zívr's sculptural work is also an important part of the book.