A professor at AVU, he runs the School of Conceptual Tendencies. The artist uses a whole range of creative tools and approaches: drawing, painting, photography, film, installations, events, etc. An important element in Šejn’s creative work is its intermediality. His works make use not only of monitors or visual machines, but also of text, words, body movement and spiritual activity itself (that is the conscience of both the creator and the viewer). A key theme and environment for Šejn’s works is the landscape (or nature, which he tends rather to perceive in its fragments). The artist also thematises subjective space and the natural image. Šejn perceives the landscape as primary reality, the fountainhead, root or basis of creation. This landscape is to a certain degree culturally-structured (there are paths through it, signs offering help). In the landscape you then find a subject around which a specific place forms. Space is oriented or hierarchised by this subject (up and down, back and forth, etc.). Such space is inhabitable, navigable. It is meant for existence or residence. The subject is not an abstract celebrity, but a corporal entity – it moves, looks around, perceives and reacts. It touches things from which a sort of indexical or natural image is created. This image has a material correlation to its model (physie eikon, naturselbstdruck, contact photographs, etc.). Šejn’s main activity is searching and collecting – pigments and products of nature. An open collection or archive is created from these materials and forms. His paintings are the result of actual events, which are not predestined, but which organise themselves, or develop from a self-regulating structure.
Studies:
1970-1975 Charles University in Prague, studio of art history, aesthetic and arts and crafts
from 1990 professor of painting, Academy of Fine Art in Prague
2001 visiting professor in Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague
2003 visiting professor in Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart
Public works:
2002
Studny/Zvony pro údolí sv. Prokopa v Praze, projekt „Sochařský park Prokopské údolí„, Nadace a Centrum pro současné výtvarné umění v Praze / Bells/Wells for Prokop´s valley in Prague, Sculpture park, Fondation and entrum fo contemporary Arts
2002
Kaple/Pramen Slunce, Vysoký svah, Pec pod Sněžkou, okna kaple a studna/zvonice / Chapel/Spring of Sun – windows of chapel/well 02, spolupráce s Roman Koucký architektonická kancelář s.r.o.
2001
Bohemiae Color / Kůže země, Velvyslanectví České republiky, London, soutěžní návrh pro ministerstvo zahraničí ČR, projekt srpen 2001 (c) Roman Koucký, Šárka Malá, Libor Kábrt, Veronika Sávová, Jiří Šafr
1996
Projekt Národní kulturní památky „Komponovaná krajina Valdštejnské loggie a Libosadu„, zadavatel Státní památkový úřad v Pardubicích a Praze
1991
Labe, projekt pro řeku, spolupráce s Helen Mayer a Newton Harrison’s a se studenty Akademie výtvarných umění v Praze: Ivanou Hanzlíkovou a Janou Peterkovou
1989
Sluneční most pro ostrovy Diomedy, projekt