Peter Oriešek

Peter Oriešek (28 August 1941 – 18 October 2015) was a Czech sculptor, medallist, painter and teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

Life Peter Oriešek was born on 28 August 1941 in Dolná Súča, Slovak Republic. He studied at the Secondary School of Art Industry in Bratislava (prof. Ľudovít Korkoš) and in 1960–1966 at the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Prague, in the sculpture studios of prof. Jan Kavan and Josef Malejovský.

After graduation he was a freelance sculptor. He exhibited independently for the first time in 1969 and then only since the late 1980s. The sculptural and drawing work of Peter Oriešek brought a completely new and unique perspective to the Czech art scene. His original artistic expression, which very sharply interprets the situation of man in the middle of the world, has its origin in the unfavourable social atmosphere in the country occupied for twenty years by Soviet troops.

Since 1995, he has been a teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, and since 1999 also at the VŠUP.

He was a member of the Association of Medal Artists, a founding member of the groups Tolerance and Lipany (1989), member of the Mánes Union of Fine Arts (1990) and the civic association Figurama (2001). He died in Prague on 18 October 2015. His wife Petra Oriešková was a prominent Czech academic painter.

Work Sculpture Peter Oriešek graduated at a time when the domestic scene was moving away from abstract art and a space was opening up for brilliant draughtsmen who were absorbing the impulses of Pop Art, Hyperrealism, and especially the broad current of New Figuration associated with a renewed interest in physicality. In his early sculptural works, expressive exaggeration is evident (Male Figure, 1965, Dead Horse, 1970s), but in his later work, despite the harshness of his expression, he adheres to realistic modelling. The sheer materiality of the human and animal figures, more vital than the actual cast body, is often obscured by a fanciful polychromy The sculptures, cast in transparent artificial resin, offer an insight into the interior with an expressive colour confusion of viscera (Figure, h. 166 cm, 1968, Pillow, 1968–1969, Birth, 1969). The existential theme of disgust, which has undergone the alienating lessons of pop art, is pushed to an ironic position in these sculptures.

His major works from the early 1970s are several variants of Anatomy of Silence (1970, GASK collection), created as polychromed assemblages of biomorphic abstract shapes in artificial resin, on a panel with a woman's head. (Anatomy of Silence, 1970, GASK)

The sculptures were primarily intended to be cast in bronze or resin, but some chamber works remained as models in their original material – a mixture of beeswax, asphalt and rosin – and are polychromed. The ceramic works were created in collaboration with Jindra Viková (Fountain, Atrium Žižkov, Figural Relief for the metro station (unrealised). Peter Oriešek was also involved in medallic and relief work, which was also published as a blind print (Faust, 1987), (Adam and Eve, 1988).

Drawing and painting The turn to drawing coincided with Oriešek's reflections on multi-figure sculptural compositions, but from the late 1970s and 1980s onwards, drawings became an entirely distinctive part of his work and, like his sculptures, depict a limit situation in life. Oriešek's drawings combine pure classicism and barbaric magic in a technically brilliant way and suggestively illustrate how close beauty and evil are to each other. They depict with extraordinary precision interpersonal relationships as epic-fantasy scenes. He later replaced the delicate and detailed modelling of hatched pencil drawings with the airbrush technique. The hyperbolic bizarreness of his drawing compositions has a direct counterpart in some of his sculptures.

The fantasy world of the painter's imagination is brought into the real space of the sculptor's studio. In contrast to the hyperrealistic figures, elements of sculptural instrumentation are composed into the painting, such as plinths, columns, sculptural reinforcements and supports replacing parts of the bodies, or strange mushroom-like formations, balls of cords or tubes, reminding us that our technical civilization is part of this world. In 2013, stamps and the cover of the first day's edition were published with drawings by Peter Oriek.

Realisations Peter Oriešek is the author of several figurative sculptures in public space as well as important memorial plaques. The plaque with the slogan When - if not now?, Who - if not us?, 17 November 1989 was unveiled on 16 November 2006 at Albertov, from where a procession of students marched on 17 November 1989, marking the beginning of the Velvet Revolution. A plaque with a bust of Václav Benda is installed on the house where the dissident Benda family lived. Ceramic mosaic on the rear facade of the Old Town Hall (Jindra Viková, Peter Oriešek, 1975) Mother and Child (1982), artificial stone, Prague-Strašnice Photographer and Model (1995), Central Military Hospital, Prague Girl with a Cage (1989), bronze, Fountain in the Park of the Na Homolce Hospital, 1991 Bust of Václav Benda, Charles Square in Prague

Representation in collections National Gallery Prague Slovak National Gallery Bratislava Moravian Gallery in Brno Gallery of Fine Arts in Cheb Gallery Klatovy/Klenová Museum of Art Olomouc Slovácké muzeum Uherské Hradiště