Zdeněk Sýkora — Structures and later Lines series

1964

Artists: Zdeněk Sýkora, Jaroslav Blažek (technical collaborator) · Year: 1964 · Medium: Painted plotter-adjacent works — compositions derived from computer-generated rules, often executed in paint · Substrate: Algorithmic rules developed with Blažek; early plotters at Charles University; later hand-executed paintings following computer-generated schemas · Place: Prague, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) · Institution: Charles University Prague; later independent practice Zdeněk Sýkora is the Czech painter who, in partnership with the mathematician Jaroslav Blažek, began producing computer-assisted compositions in 1964. His Structures series used algorithmic rules to determine the placement and orientation of geometric elements across a composition; the Lines series, begun in the late 1960s and continuing through his final years, used computer-generated paths to produce continuous meandering lines, often painted on large canvases with decisions made in advance by the algorithm but executed by hand in oil on canvas. Sýkora's practice corrects the standard Western histories of early computer art by showing that serious algorithmic-art work was being made inside the Eastern Bloc contemporaneously with the Stuttgart school and Bell Labs. He had been a working painter in Prague since the 1950s, associated with the Club of Concrete Artists, and his turn to computers came from his mathematical interests rather than from institutional encouragement. The Czech computing infrastructure available to him was limited; Blažek's collaboration was critical. Sýkora was recognized as a major European artist in the 1980s and 1990s; his work is in the collections of Centre Pompidou, Ludwig Museum, and major Czech institutions. He continued producing Lines paintings into his final years; he died in 2011 at ninety-one. His practice is significant enough that a dedicated Sýkora Foundation continues his legacy in Prague. He is, alongside Waldemar Cordeiro and Hiroshi Kawano, one of the great corrections to the Euro-American canon of first-generation computer art. Lore Sýkora had been teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and at Charles University. His collaboration with Blažek began over a shared interest in combinatorial mathematics applied to visual form. The Czech communist regime was ambivalent about abstract and algorithmic art, and Sýkora's work was periodically censored or restricted in domestic exhibitions through the 1970s and 1980s. His full international recognition came only after 1989. The Sýkora Foundation in Prague maintains his archive and studio. Sources • Sýkora Foundation archive (Prague) • Centre Pompidou — Sýkora collection • Klütsch, Christoph — Zdeněk Sýkora: Between 1945 and 1995 (Galerie Zdeněk Sklenář, 2010)