Drápal Vladimír 1921–2015

Franta Daněk in sweater, 1974

oil on canvas, author's frame, 49 × 42 cm, signed. PD Vl. Drápal 74

The work of painter, graphic artist and sculptor Vladimír Drápal has been a lifelong associated with his native village of Tvarožná u Brna. It provided him with inspiration and themes from village life, with images of peasants and Moravian women, domestic animals, and rural colouring, which in his He thematised them in his own distinctive way. Vladimír Drápal's work is based on the modernist tradition of in shape abbreviation, abstract, reduced expression and sovereign drawing made with a few strokes of the pen, reminiscent of Picasso's inspiration or the shape and volume modelling of Brancusi and Moore. Intentional stylization of human figures, portraits and animals leading to various shapes and deformations does not bring his work closer to the grotesque, but rather to the form of of prehistoric and primitive depictions and pre-images, emphasizing only certain archetypal features and characteristics of the depicted object. In this way Drápal's favourite rural women are often depicted as "Venus" or unique sculptural portraits of villagers. Ceramic or wooden busts of various male types and characters were first modelled in a sculptural manner, but after the middle of the 1970s, they were dominated by a compact, smooth volume, into in which the features of the sitter are engraved with several concise precise interventions. Drápal's favourite motif was the horse, especially his studies of head or its emaciated, sinewy body marked by hard labour, depicted in various variations. The offered bronze sculpture of a horse from 1985 materializes the silhouette of a horse from a 1969 graphic sheet. Extreme reduction is represented by the bronze sculpture of the Smoker (2008) with its emphasis on the cubic volumes of individual human body parts without descriptive or portrait 148 elements, which is close to Zdeněk Palcro's way of working with matter. Vladimír Drápal graduated from the School of Arts and Crafts in 1938-1942 in Brno and in 1945-1949 at the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Prague in the studio of Josef Kaplický. From the 1960s onwards, he studied at the school of Kaplikle in Prague. In the 1960s he worked as a teacher at what is now Brno's Masaryk University, where where he educated a number of outstanding artistic personalities. Since 1958 he was a member of the Brno creative group Profil and since 1990 a member of the Q Brno Association. He created a number of sculptural realizations for public space, e.g. Venus (1982) in Brno's Anthropos Park and many others. His work is represented, among others, in the collections of the National Gallery in Prague, Moravian Gallery, Brno City Museum and is in the collections of many European galleries. For his lifelong artistic and pedagogical career He has been repeatedly awarded the Brno City Prize, in 2011 he received the South Moravian Region and received the Artis Bohemiae Amicis medal. Lit: Milada Hlaváčková, Jiří Hlušička, Jaroslav Malina: Vladimír Drápal, Brno 2010. This work is accompanied by a monograph V. Drápal.