Tomáš Vosolsobě

Tomáš Vosolsobě (born March 7, 1937 in Prague , † January 10, 2011 in Slaný ) was a Czech painter, casual photographer and philatelist .

biography

Family and childhood

Tomáš Vosolsobě was born in Prague as the only son of Ladislav and Marie Vosolsobě. His father worked in a bank and later managed industrial companies that ran the bank. Due to the frequent change of job, the family moved several times. In 1947 Tomáš Vosolsobě settled with his parents in Uhříněves near Prague, where his father became the director of the brick factory. Tomáš Vosolsobě lived at this address until 1982. Art was a natural part of the Vosolsobě family; But he was particularly interested in the art course taught by the academic painter Jan Fořt, which he attended during elementary school.

Education

From 1952 Tomáš Vosolsobě studied at the School of Applied Arts in Prague, where he was a student in Demeter Livora's class. After the school was reorganized in 1954, he became a student at the School of Fine Arts in Prague on Hollarovo náměstí, where he was taught drawing and painting in the third year of Karel Tondl and in the fourth year of Karel Müller. After graduating from high school in 1956, he was accepted to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. First he studied figure and portrait painting in the studio with Vladimír Sychra, from the third year in the studio of Vlastimil Rada and from the summer semester with Karel Souček, where he graduated with an honorary year in 1962.

Years 1963-1970

After completing his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, he worked as a professional artist, he was also active as a filmmaker and commercial artist. During his studies Tomáš Vosolsobě became acquainted with abstract painting, although the doctrine of socialist realism prevailed in the 1950s and it was very difficult to approach contemporary art. Tomáš Vosolsobě was strongly influenced by an article by the Czech art critic and art theorist Jiří Padrta, which was published in the Revue Bildende Kunst in 1957 and dealt with what was happening in the art scene in Western Europe and America at the time. Tomáš Vosolsobě did not join any of the emerging informal art groups. During this time he experimented and looked for his own way. He dealt with the problems of informal art, experimented with pouring and spraying ink on paper. Motifs of kings and whistles from playing cards, dogs, abstract landscapes and female figures appeared in his pictures. An essential part of his work was the technique of decalcification, the reversed symmetrical copy, which animated him in his artistic beginnings and which he further developed. He worked with Indian ink, watercolors and guache colors. From the mid-1960s, concrete objects appeared in his pictures - paper, coins, metal and wooden plates.

In 1964 Tomáš Vosolsobě had his first solo exhibition in the Mánes Club in Prague. He took part in the previews of young artists in Prague and Brno in 1965, 1966 and 1967, which offered his generation unique opportunities for artistic confrontation - the exhibition of boys 65 in ÚLUV in Prague, the exhibition of boys in Moravian ( Moravská) Gallery in Brno and the exhibition New Names in the Václav Špála Gallery in Prague.

Tomáš Vosolsobě was also a passionate philatelist and was particularly interested in aerophilately. He also devoted himself to poster art, as an author and illustrator he drew attention to himself in the publications Gothic Art (Umění gotické) and Art of the Renaissance (Umění renesance), which the Czech state publisher of children's books published in 1966.

The film sector was very close to him, he was friends with the Czech directors Karel Vachek and Jiří Menzel as well as with the cameraman Jozef Ort-Šnep. He participated in the making of the documentaries Conversations on the Landscape ( Hovory o krajině ) (1969) and Vladimír Preclík's Sculptures ( Vladimíra Preclíka sochy ) (1970) for the short film Prague .

At the end of the 1960s, another stage in his artistic life followed - the stage of learning, experimenting and finding his own style.

1970s

In the 1970s there was no place in the Czechoslovakian cultural scene for artists like Tomáš Vosolsobě - for an individualist who insisted on his artistic expression and stuck to his steadfast approach to life. Due to his disloyalty to the communist regime, Tomáš Vosolsobě was not part of the art elite. The focal point for him was the collaboration with the Postal Museum in Prague, which began in the late 1960s when he worked out the artistic concept of the philatelic exposition as part of the Universal Postal Exhibition Praga 1968. Tomáš Vosolsobě was gradually commissioned with the photo documentation of the collectibles and the postal service. A high point of his photographic activity were the portraits from the years 1977 to 1979, which showed the artists and etchers involved in the design of postage stamps - František Gross, Zdeněk Sklenář, Josef Liesler and Kamil Lhoták. The difficult situation led to his departure to Switzerland in 1982.

Swiss period

In the Switzerland Tomáš Vosolsobě moved with his wife Rita, who from the Swiss Zurich came. First they lived in Schliern near Köniz in the canton of Bern and from 1986 in Zurich. He returned to free creation, to copying and axis symmetry. At first he mainly worked with gouache paints, later he used acrylic resins on Pavatex . The colors became more intense. As a reaction to the surroundings in which he moved, his pictures were dominated by a very clear coloring and contrasts of pure colors (red, green, yellow, blue). The clear sky, color contrasts and the colourfulness of the southern countries - Italy and Spain, which he visited regularly - inspired him. His pictures were influenced by experiences and real situations, such as the taillights of cars driving on the autobahn, but also by the symmetry of the baroque buildings. He exhibited mainly in Switzerland, but also in Germany and Italy , and also participated in organizing the exhibitions.

From 1992 he visited the Czech Republic sporadically. In 1993 he presented his drawings and pictures in the Postal Museum in Prague - in his first exhibition in the Czech Republic after leaving for Switzerland. For the exhibition he designed both a special stamp and a postcard imprint. In the following years, Czech museums and galleries presented a cross-section of his work.

Return to the Czech Republic

In 2000 he returned to the Czech Republic forever and settled with his wife in the central Bohemian town of Velvary . Tomáš Vosolsobě devoted himself in Velvary mainly to organizing and presenting his life's work. His pictures and drawings have been exhibited in a number of Czech museums and galleries in solo and collective exhibitions. At the beginning of 2011 Tomáš Vosolsobě died shortly before his 74th birthday and was buried in the Velvary cemetery. In 2012 a valid stamp was issued with the motif of a drawing by Tomáš Vosolsobě.

His artistic style was very personal and his works always reacted to the changing times. He was a representative of informal art, in his visual works he developed the theme of symmetry and a significant part of his works he dedicated to color contrasts. He was a member of the Association of Czechoslovak Visual Artists, the Union of Visual Artists of the Czech Republic and the Central Bohemian Association of Artists. He exhibited his pictures in a number of solo and collective exhibitions.

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personal data
SURNAME	Vosolsobě, Tomáš
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Czech painter, casual photographer and philatelist
DATE OF BIRTH	March 7, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH	Prague
DATE OF DEATH	January 10, 2011
Place of death	Slaný