Václav Malina

At the start of the eighties Václav Malina was one of the most important artists on the Czechoslovak art scene, developing the topic of a conceptual reflection of nature, but without deserting the painted picture, as opposed to his companion of the same generation from Pilsen, Milan Maur. Within the Pilsen creative scene he also occupies an important role as creative columnist, teacher and curator, and from 2000 as 2009 as director of the Pilsen Municipal Gallery.

At the start of his career he was heavily influenced by two teachers, Jiří Patera and Zdeněk Sýkora. However, during his studies at the Philosophical Faculty, Prague (where fine art was taught at that time), Malina only caught up with the second of these teachers, while he had the opportunity to become acquainted with the prematurely retired Patera at the end of the seventies and beginning of the eighties within Pilsen-based creative circles, which were visited by other important personalities of the creative life of the time (Milan Maur and the theoreticians Bronislav Losenický and Vladimír Venda). Patera directed him in towards large-scale, very colouristic painting, the style which characterised his early work. Sýkor’s example again moved Malina in the direction of grandly conceived compositions of clean geometrical surfaces and strong lines, often presented in large formats, though he never inclined toward purely systematic painting. Although many of his works give a purely non-figurative impression, they find their basis in specific, lived landscapes and nature.

After the early cycles Fields and Walls, where Malina examined the relationships between coloured fields, in the middle of the eighties he arrived at an original revaluation of impressionism. Coloured stains or rectangular segments create optical structures evoking the light in the landscape (the cycles entitled Memories of Impressionism, Impressions, Pointillism). It was at this time that overlaps began to appear with a painterly conceived object, where he followed a similar problematic (e.g. objects poured from painted ping pong balls, thread objects transforming with gravity, etc.). Another important sphere of his painting is the expression of musical rhythms via a kind of geometric score. In the last cycles entitled Constructive Impressions and Construction by Colours, he uses colour ideas which in the process of the gradual compensation of forms and colour qualities become a clear, sharply focused geometric form, emphasised by the coloured contour. As well as painting he is involved in graphic design.

Malina, Václav: Od imprese ke konceptu. Text v katalogu výstavy Koncepty a imprese ve VS Sokolská 26. Ostrava 2004. www.ckv-ostrava.cz/katalogy/malina.htm