Jiří Slíva: Kresbou ke smyslu
| Title in English | Jiří Slíva: Through Drawing to Sense |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Monograph |
| Citation | |
| Description | The artist, graphic designer, painter, musician, poet, sociologist and futurist Jiří Slíva (born in Pilsen, 1947) is a one-off in both Czech and European context in the field of cartoon humour, illustration and free graphic art, as well as painting and small sculpture. Slíva’s works have won a number of awards and are represented in many private and public collections. His works are characterised by a sense of humour, exaggeration, condensed visual and textual message, and the ability to almost literally capture the chosen theme. Slíva has developed a distinctive artistic style characterised by simplicity and stylised drawing with distinctive contour lines and bright colours. The catalogue of the exhibition in the Gallery of West Bohemia in Pilsen presents Jiří Slíva somewhat unconventionally. It does not display his typical artworks drawing themes from the world of coffee, wine, jazz, Kafka, relationships between men and women etc.; instead, it emphasises the artistic aspect of his work. First and foremost, Jiří Slíva is an excellent graphic artist who, by means of prompt and adroit drawing, captures immediate ideas, observations about petty affairs that are happening around him in numerous variants of one theme striving to find an ideal solution. Only then does conscious stylization and execution take over in the unmistakable ‘Slíva-Esque’ style. In addition to the various demonstrations of his drawing skills the exhibition also presents Slíva’s ways of text processing, which also contribute to the thoughtful developing of the meaning of individual works. Last but not least, Slíva’s making use of famous artistic or pop-art ‘icons’ is presented, the citations of Mickey Mouse and Charlie Chaplin being the best-known examples. The title of the exhibition, ‘Kresbou ke smyslu / Through Drawing to Sense’, is a play of words referring to the drawing mastery of Jiří Slíva as well to ‘smysl’ – a word that has three meanings in Czech: sense, meaning and senses as receptors through which we perceive the surrounding world. |
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