Vladimír Drápal 1921–2015

Horse on a plinth, 1985

bronze, height 27 cm, signed VL. DRAPAL 85
Provenance: from the artist's studio. The work of painter, graphic artist and sculptor Vladimír Drápal has been a lifelong associated with his native village of Tvarožná u Brna. It has 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. Drápal's work is based on modernist tradition, which consists in shape abbreviation, abstract, reduced expression and sovereign drawing made up of a few pen strokes, reminiscent of Picasso's inspiration or the shape and volume modelling of Brancusi and Moore. The deliberate stylization of human figures, portraits and animals leads to various shape deformations does not bring his work closer to the grotesque, but rather to the form of prehistoric and primitive depictions and pre-images, emphasizing only certain archetypal features and characteristics of the depicted object. Thus Drápal's favourite rural women are often depicted in this way. as Venus" or unique sculptural portraits of villagers. Ceramic or wooden busts of various male types and characters were first sculpted in a plastic sculptural manner, but after the middle 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 VLADIMIR DRÁPAL reduction is represented by the bronze sculpture of the Smoker (2008) with its emphasis on cubic volumes of individual parts of the human body without descriptive or portrait 148 elements, which is close to Zdeněk Palcro's way of working with matter.