Jaroslav Kovář

Jaroslav Kovář (born February 1, 1936 in Brno , Czechoslovakia, † April 19, 2001 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was a Czech painter and etcher .

life and work

childhood and education

Kovář was born the son of a graphic artist and painter. He grew up in an artistic environment. After the Heydrich era , the family moved to Prague in 1943 , where he attended school. At the age of fourteen, Kovář designed his first graphics. After leaving school, Kovář wanted to become a graphic artist, but was not given a place to study by the responsible authorities, but was given the choice of either becoming a miner or a paver. The Prague School of Applied Arts opened an additional sculpture department in 1951. As the entrance examination took place later than in other entrance procedures, Kovář applied, passed the entrance examination and was admitted to the Prague School of Applied Arts. Here he met his future wife Mirka. After a year, Kovář switched to graphics.

Art history was taught parallel to the technical subjects. During the four-year training he spent the holidays with his grandmother in Moravia, where the landscape painting "Kaple ma pochodu" (= "the running chapel") was created in 1953/54.

Art academy and military

In 1955 he graduated from high school with distinction. Kovář and his friend Boris Soukup were then accepted at the Art Academy in Prague. Soukup was expelled from the academy for obscure reasons and joined the military. Kovář also interrupted his studies from 1958 to 1960 at his own request to also join the military. From 1960 to 1963 Kovář spent again at the art academy and completed his studies. In the following year he was allowed to use the studio as well as all equipment and materials, and numerous works were created.

In Prague

In 1961, Kovář applied for a scholarship unsuccessfully because the jury considered him suitable “to work for the capitalists, but not for the working population”. In the same year Kovář married his school friend Mirka. In 1968, Kovář and Soukup were arrested and interrogated.

Between 1961 and 1968 he created several abstract, mostly large-format oil paintings. During this time, Kovář was particularly interested in Cubism . Kovář traveled to Germany for the first time as early as 1966 to show his work at the “Czech Drawings and Graphics” exhibition in Freiburg. However, he was not officially an exhibition participant in Germany, but unofficially as a companion of his wife on a bus tour through Germany.

He joined the Hollar Association of Czech Graphic Artists. Kovář's works have been exhibited in several galleries in Prague. Kovář's work as a book illustration began at this time and continued in the following years. Kovář and his wife never joined any of the communist associations.

In Germany

In the late summer of 1968 the couple left Prague with the risk of not being able to return. They traveled to Munich, where they were picked up by the patron and art collector Franz Anton Morat and brought to Freiburg. The Morat couple found an apartment for the refugees and arranged the formalities regarding the asylum procedure. In November of the same year Kovář was represented with some pictures in the exhibition “Palette” in Freiburg. In spring 1969 he exhibited in Saarbrücken.

Although Kovář increasingly turned away from painting - in favor of etching and drawing - he remained true to the painterly elements in his works.

Around 1969, Kovář looked at the portfolio “Eight Etchings” for Aloysius Bertrand “Gaspar de la nuit”. All sheets are hand-pressed, numbered and signed and illustrated with drypoint and aquatint . The texts are by Aloysius Bertrand , a French poet of symbolism .

In 1968 Kovář discovered his interest in Baroque painting. He created leaves with images of frames, some of which are empty and some of which are also provided with depictions of Madonnas. Over time, the frames gave way, but the Madonnas remained one of his motifs.

From this work, the so-called Šlapáci emerged from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s , which form a significant part of Kovář's work. With the Šlapáci, Kovář broke away from the medium of paper and started working with wood. These wooden pictures are strongly inspired by pictorial forms, especially the reliefs of Surrealism . During this time he also produced prints and drawings, as well as portfolios with different texts, which were illustrated with lithographs and etchings. In addition to the Madonnas as motifs, depictions of hills and towers were added as motifs, which in turn merged into the series of "Sinking Objects", which Kovář dealt with from the mid-1970s.

In 1989 Kovář finally completed the “Portrait of Mr. Herrmann”, a neighbor whom Kovář saw every day, half of his face illuminated, sitting at the window. The largely abstract drawings that were created in the space of a few years between 1987 and 1993 were not infrequently large-format. The theme of the diptych recurred several times. During these years, Kovář mainly drew with chalk on wrapping paper, which he then laid on chipboard. The drawings were often processed by applying a glaze of gouache . The method of representation was always picturesque.

In the 1990s, Kovář tried to exchange Czech and German artists, and for this purpose he organized numerous exhibitions. In June 1992 Kovář was made an honorary member of the Masaryk Academy of Arts in Prague. In the same year, Jarek received a scholarship, during which he stayed for three months in the Cismar monastery . The “Cismar folder” emerged from this scholarship. Towards the end of the 90s, between 1998 and 2000, the series "Reflexe" was created, which consisted almost without exception of etchings and which continued until 1999. The beginnings of the "Reflexe" series can be seen in these etchings.

In the late summer of 1997, Kovář became seriously ill. In December 1997 the Brügel / Kovář portfolio was presented. In the last years of his life, Kovář dealt with the series “Reflexe”, which consists of 32 small-format etchings. The portfolio “Praha” was created between 1996 and 1999 and consists exclusively of original works and personal documents. It contains personal notes, photographs, drawings, sketches and collages, as well as works by close friends of Kovář and drawings by his father, which he places next to his own and processes, alienates, paints over or comments. It can be viewed in the Norbert Hahn Collection, Freiburg.

Around 2000, Kovář began revising drawings and prints that had been made around 1995. In doing so, he painted over half of the sheet with light gouache paints, so that there was a strong separation of the sheet into two halves - a light and a dark side.

His last completed drawing from the beginning of 2001 is small-format, black and gray and streaked with a yellow line. Kovář drew here on very thick handmade paper that his father made . The drawing can be traced back to the series that Kovář called “Dance of the White Line”.

plant

Kovář refined his technical possibilities and led the art of etching to an almost painterly expression that was hardly seen until then. In addition to his paintings, his painterly prints, drawings and reworked sheets of paper are also part of his painterly work. Kovář drew a not insignificant part of his work not only from Czech culture, but also from the art of Baroque and Surrealism, which had experienced a special form in Czechoslovakia. Both cultural-historical references are already noticeable in the formal description of Jaroslav Kovář's work: the baroque in the design of light and shadow and the dynamic spatial conception, which does not define the space via measurable distances and in clear topographical relationships, but via the empathy of movement currents and the emotional immersion in indefinable depths makes space tangible. And surrealism in the autonomy of the graphic means, such as hatching and texture , but also the intention to avoid content-related fixation and unambiguity.

method

Jaroslav Kovář insisted on being called an eraser, namely an eraser in the traditional craft sense. For him, this term stood for an artistic attitude that is associated with the terms such as solid craftsmanship, continuity, but also open-mindedness and sensitivity for change and development. First of all, it makes sense to look at the technical aspect of Jaroslav Kovář's etchings. Without exception, Kovář always used the same procedure: he began with the etching needle, with which he drew hatching in the etched ground, then switched to aquatint without even picking up the needle again until the work was finally completed.

The sequence of the manual procedure corresponds to the structure of the design process. At the beginning there is the greatest possible contrast between hatching and surface etching. Here you can already see how openly Kovář understood the term traditional handicraft. Because in order to be able to etch line and surface in one work step at all, Kovář dissolved the etching base for the line etching in the previously unprocessed areas with a brush and solvent and placed the plate treated in this way into the acid without the grain, which is essential for the aquatint traditional etching was avoided as much as possible. In this way, typical traces of brushstrokes emerge which, without being etched with aquatint grain, show only a light gray over a large area and partially at most a medium dark value. In addition to the line etching of the hatches, the first status prints consistently show more or less random areas structured by brush marks. As a rule, there were more than two to five status prints between the first status print and the final image solution. In the last phase, Kovář usually used large-scale aquatint to summarize individual areas in a differentiated but uniform darkness in order to increase the contrast of the overall picture or to characterize the spatial situation more clearly.

No matter how determined the sequence of work steps may be, while working on the record, Kovář reacted immediately to the constantly changing situation with sensitivity and artistic calculation. An extensive repertoire of graphic means of expression and the manual experience with etching gave him great freedom of choice. The range of hatching shapes in his work is astonishing. In addition, he developed differentiated, conveying shapes from the specific peculiarities of the hatchings, which led to a completely new graphic texture.

Jaroslav Kovář basically did all the work on and with the eraser plate himself, from polishing the zinc plate, applying the etching base with a thin, elastic layer of asphalt varnish to printing.

Works in collections

• Graphic collection of the National Gallery in Prague
• Museum of Fine Arts, Cheb
• Morat Institute for Art and Art History, Freiburg
• Norbert Hahn Collection, Freiburg
• Museum of New Art, Freiburg
• Bavarian State Library, Munich
• Duke August Library , Wolfenbüttel
• National Literature Memorial, Prague

Art in public space

• Art in architecture: CLUA (Chemical State Research Institute); Flour scale, Freiburg im Breisgau

Illustrations

• Illustration of the volume of poetry Flowers of Old Korea by Libor Koval, Verlag Kunst und Literatur 1986, ISBN 3-925591-08-7 .
• Illustration of the volume of poetry Dvanáct listů z kalendáře (Twelve sheets of the calendar), Verlag H&H 1996, ISBN 80-85787-95-4 .
• Illustration of the novel Chov ( Aufzucht ) by Kenzaburó Oé, Nobel Prize Winner for Literature 1994, Verlag H&H 1999, ISBN 80-86022-40-4 .

Film about Kovář

• Film contemporary art, Jaroslav Kovář , 1996, production Marquardt exhibitions Munich

Exhibitions and grants

• 1964 Museum Olomouc (with his father)
• 1964 "Young Artists from the CSSR" in the Lincoln Center, New York (USA)
• 1965 Academy of Arts, West Berlin
• 1966 “Czech Drawing and Graphics”, Freiburg
• 1968 “Young graphics from the CSSR”, Hamburg
• 1968 retrospective, Stadthalle Freiburg (solo exhibition)
• 1969 Elitzer Gallery, Saarbrücken (solo exhibition)
• 1971 Morat Collection, Kaiser Gallery, Freiburg
• 1971 Baden Württemberg Artist Association, Emmerich, Hagen, Las Palmas
• 1973 Galerie Wallenstein, Kiel (solo exhibition)
• 1973 City Gallery Fulda (solo exhibition)
• 1974 Galerie an der Brücke, Säckingen (solo exhibition)
• 1979 Aldegrever Society scholarship holder
• 1981 Sala di Arte Caja Insular de Ahorros, Las Palmas (ES) (solo exhibition)
• 1982 Gallery Hagenring, Hagen (solo exhibition)
• 1984 International Biennale Della Grafica, Nago - Torbole (IT)
• 1985 Catholic Academy, Freiburg (solo exhibition)
• 1986 Georg-Scholz-Haus, Waldkirch (solo exhibition)
• 1987 Selest Art Regio 87, Locaux du Cedric, Sélestat (FR)
• 1987 PUG - Uni-Center / Kirchforum, Bochum (solo exhibition)
• 1987 Villa Berberich, Bad Säckingen
• 1991 La Galeria del Club Prensa, Las Palmas (ES) (solo exhibition)
• 1991 "Etchings", Gallery for Fine Arts Cheb (CZ) (solo exhibition)
• 1991 The European Trienal Competition of non Tradition Graphic, Prague (CZ)
• 1991 Honorary member of the Masaryk Academy of Arts, Prague (CZ)
• 1992 Kunstverein March (solo exhibition)
• 1992 40 years of Baden-Württemberg
• 1992 Morat Institute for Art and Art History (solo exhibition)
• 1992 Galerie Rasche, Freiburg (solo exhibition)
• 1993 scholarship from the state of Schleswig-Holstein, Cismar monastery
• 1993 "Graphics", Hollar Gallery, Prague (CZ) (solo exhibition)
• 1993 Exposition de l´association de la gravure tcheque, Paris, Epinay-sur Seine (FR)
• 1993 Scholarship holders - Künstlerhaus Cismar, Brunswiker Pavillon, Kiel
• 1994 "Black Art of Graphics", Waldkirch
• 1994 XIV. Mini Print International, Cadaques (ES)
• 1995 "Four etchers", Museum Offenburg and Gallery Fronta, Prague (CZ)
• 1996 Anniversaries 1996, Hollar Gallery, Prague (CZ)
• 1996 XVI. Mini Print International, Cadaques (ES)
• 1996 Drawings and graphics, Marquardt Gallery, Munich (solo exhibition)
• 1997 International Print Trienale, Cairo (Egypt)
• 1997 "Colored Drawings and Graphics", Galerie Rasche, Freiburg (solo exhibition)
• 1998 Hollar Association, Old Town Hall Prague (CZ)
• 1998 "Zwischenhoch", artist workshop flour scales, Freiburg
• 1998 Czech Culture Days, Staufen
• 1998 Drawings, Gallery of Fine Arts, Cheb (CZ) (solo exhibition)
• 1999 "Eraser from Freiburg", Kunstverein Germersheim
• 2000 "Etching and drawing", Kunstverein March (solo exhibition)
• 2000 PRAHA art folder, Morat Institute for Art and Art History, Freiburg (solo exhibition)
• 2000 I. International Drawing Biennale, Pilsen (CZ)
• 2000 Participation in the annual exhibition of the Baden-Württemberg Artists' Union
• 2001 Anniversaries 2001, Hollar Gallery, Prague (CZ)
• 2001 "Drawings", Kunstverein Kirchzarten (solo exhibition)
• 2002 50 years of Czech graphics, Mánes Gallery, Prague (CZ)
• 2002 "Dialog", Czech Cultural Center, Dresden (with E. Ranný Jun.)
• 2002 "Drawings and Etchings", Gallery K, Staufen (solo exhibition)
• 2004 "Artists of the Gallery", Gallery K, Staufen
• 2006 “Čepelák - Kovář - Maier”, Gallery K, Staufen
• 2006 "The Art of Etching", Museum of Modern Art, Freiburg (solo exhibition) and Museum of Fine Arts, Cheb (CZ) (solo exhibition)
• 2007 portfolio works, artist workshop L6, Freiburg (solo exhibition)
• 2007 25 years of KreisKunst, district of Breisgau-Hochschwarzwald
• 2008 "Inventory - Contemporary Etching in Germany", Kunstverein Reutlingen
• 2009 "Inventory - Contemporary Etching in Germany", Pablo Picasso Museum, Münster
• 2009 "Drawing and Sculpture: Kovář / Mother / Bollin", House of Modern Art, Staufen
• 2010 "Summer Exhibition - Artists of the Gallery", House of Modern Art, Staufen
• 2011 "Snow Crystals", Gallery von Maltzahn, Munich (January 2011)
• 2011 "Kovář / Peterka", Hollar Gallery, Prague (CZ) (June – July 2011)
• 2011 "Jaroslav Kovář / Heinrich Mutter / Walter Schelenz", House of Modern Art, Staufen (November 2011 - January 2012)
• 2012 “Summer Exhibition. Artists of the Gallery “, House of Modern Art, Staufen
• 2013 “Risz / Drawing”, artist workshop L6 eV Freiburg

literature

• Jaroslav Kovář. The art of etching. Umĕní leptu. Freiburg Municipal Museums, Museum of New Art and Museum of Fine Arts Cheb. 2006, ISBN 3-9806821-0-2 .
• Inventory - contemporary etching in Germany. Graphics Museum Pablo Picasso Münster and Kunstverein Reutlingen. 2008, ISBN 978-3-937014-56-2 .

Movie

• Contemporary art, Jaroslav Kovář. 1996, production Marquardt exhibitions Munich

Web links

• Short biography, illustrations
• Tension between opposing poles. Badish newspaper. 5th July 2013

Individual evidence

1. ^ Jochen Ludwig, Jiří Vykoukal in: Jaroslav Kovář. The art of etching. Umění leptu. Publisher: Städtische Museen Freiburg - Museum of New Art and Museum of Fine Arts Cheb, 2006, ISBN 3-9806821-0-2 .
2. ↑ Eberhard Brügel in: Jaroslav Kovář, the eraser. Morat Institute, Freiburg im Breisgau 1992.