Laco Sorokáč

Laco Sorokáč entered the art scene while he was still a student in the 1980s. He took part at that time in several Confrontations – exhibitions organized in non-gallery spaces in the courtyards between buildings or in gardens. The young generation, dissatisfied with what they were forced to do in school, made it clear that they wanted to find their own path. It was above all the new expressive wave that connected these artists - whether they be sculptors or artists.

Sorokáč’s work turned in the same direction during this period. The artist created in an expressive spirit a series of colourful figural sculptors out of wood or plaster. The sculptors from this period have not been preserved because someone robbed Sorokáč’s studio. Surprisingly, Sorokáč did not regret this too much since by the end of the 1980s he felt a kind of weariness of the expressive style and enthusiastically returned to more geometric forms, although figurative trends sometimes appear in his work at that time, albeit in a different concept.

A specific link between the 1980s and 90s is the abstract wood sculpture Telescope which brings an expressiveness with its distorted shapes. A radical break from the past then appears following 1990 when he creates sculptures and objects of simple abstract shapes. In 1995, he began working with installations as well: He crammed a room with two large steel rings, covered a wall and floor with fabrics and scattered toothpicks on the floor. In the 1990s, tin became Sorokáč’s most frequently used material. He used it to create, for instance, a geometric relief in which the artist probes the heritage of modern abstract art, which he paraphrases. In 1997, he made the sculpture Christ, which we can perceive as an abstract figure and abstract object. In this work the sculptor deals with the moment in which the angular form crosses over into a rounded one. He also worked with the roundness of form in various droplet-like objects.

From 2000 Sorokáč began enriching his material repertoire, creating sculptures from stone, steel, plaster and aluminium. The sculptures are mostly abstract, a figure does appear (Fear, 2010). Somewhat mysterious objects are the small sculptures entitled Breast (2011). It’s as if the artist’s imagination began to work here with a surrealistic flare: a woman’s breast is an oblong round form connected to a skull. This is a symbolic depiction of two fields of life – birth and death. On the one side is the infant nourished by maternal milk – the beginning – and on the other side stands death – the end. He also works with the principles of the imagination in the sculpture Jump (2011) created for a symposium in China. This is a metamorphosis of a fish into a person: the fish swallows the human figure. But we can read the sculpture the other way as well: the person devours the fish.

The largest Sorokáč work to date is the Gate of Athletes (2008). The nearly five-metre-high sculpture of a leaning skier stylised in the form of an inflated gate to an athletic event is set at the last tram station in Liberec. The sculpture welcomed visitors of the World Ski Championship in Liberec in February 2009 and has remained there ever since: as a symbolic entry gate to the Ještěd Mountain ski and recreation centre.

2011

Socha Mistra Jana Husa na hrad Krakovec, spolupráce M4 architekti, 3 místo

2010

Funeerální socha na čestné urnové pohřebiště Ústředního hřbitova města Brna, M4 architekti , 3 místo

Památník holocaustu v Brně, spolupráce – M4 architekti

2009

Jezdecká socha Jošta Moravského Brno, spolupráce M4 architekti

Památník generála Pattona, Plzeň, spolupráce M4 architekti

Socha Jana Pernera Česká Třebová , spolupráce M4 architekti

2008

,,Brána borců“, realizace - areál Ještěď , Liberec, Czech Republic

2006

kašna v obchodním středisku „Šestka“, realizace – Praha, Czech Republic

2005

pomník Voskovci a Werichovi, realizace – Sázava, Czech Republic

2004

pomník Prof. Otto Wichterle - 2. místo, Praha, Czech Republic

Symposiums:

2011

12te mezinárodní sochařské sympózium , 3tí světová sochařská konference (High-tech Development Zone) Changchun, Čína

2010

II. mezinárodní výtvarné symposium ,,Hommage a Erna Masarovičová“ – Bratislava, Slovensko

2006

mezinárodní sochařské sympozium - Neumark ad Raab, Rakousko

1998

mezinárodní sochařské sympozium - České Budějovice, Czech Republic