2024-03-02 02:54:15
The white mannequin in the shop window on Prague’s Národní třída does not offer any goods, yet it makes passers-by stop. The tourist presses her glasses to her nose with her index finger and scrutinizes the thin figure in a strange position. Then a companion approaches the woman and they continue to Wenceslas Square. The mannequin with outstretched arms continues as if conjuring a busy street behind the glass.
The shop window belongs to the Václav Špála Gallery. Its three distinct floors are now hosting a small retrospective of the sculptor, professor of the Brno Faculty of Fine Arts of the Technical University and pioneer of digital sculpture Michal Gabriel. The exhibition of the works of the sixty-three-year-old former member of the group Tvrdohlaví is called Tváří v tvar, and will last until March 17.
“Even if it doesn’t seem like it, the gallery offers a lot of space. Only the passages are quite limiting,” says curator Lucie Pangrácová. He regrets that some of the author’s larger objects could not be passed through due to the narrow doors. But others do: a video of a crane lifting a five-meter shark statue has attracted attention on social networks. He swam quite gracefully through the window to the first floor.
Manipulation requiring heavy technique is not unusual for Gabriel. He likes to place his works in non-traditional, especially natural places – sometimes for a few days, or even just hours. For the experience of combining landscape with art and a few photos that record the result. The effect is so strong that it once softened even the army’s security, as was shown in the Slovak city of Malacky.
Michal Gabriel picked out a beautiful, deserted terrain reminiscent of a savanna. And when he was taking the three ordered red sharks to a corner of Bratislava, where they were to be placed permanently, he let the load stop at Malacek. With the help of several students and the ordered equipment, he pulled the sharks out and placed them in the grass. It didn’t take long for security to arrive. It turned out that the “savanna” is a strictly guarded military area where you are not allowed to even stop, let alone do anything with the crane. But the red predators in the middle of the peaceful landscape looked so breathtaking that the artist got away with it without consequences.
Computer sculpting
The shark now on display in “The Flash” is black. The surface consists of walnut shells, one of the typical features of Gabriel’s work. The madonna on the ground floor or the three seated figures in the black-painted basement space have a similar walnut structure – all life-size sculptures representing works up to thirty years old.
Michal Gabriel with a smaller shark on Šilingrová náměstí in Brno. | Photo: Anna Vavríková / MF DNES + LN / Profimedia.cz
Current works are represented by smaller sculptures or small reliefs, in the creation of which the author uses digital tools. They began to penetrate world art in the 1990s. Michal Gabriel, the Czech pioneer of computer sculpture, has been working on them since the turn of the millennium. “It opened up new possibilities for him, which are now also being discovered by his other colleagues. It brings independence from the limitations of the material,” explains Lucie Pangrácová.
Suddenly, the shape can be achieved without the sculptor physically modeling. “Or to transfer the work that he has already created into the digital space and then manipulate it in a way that was never possible before. Digital tools completely open up the space for imagination, it’s a revelation for the sculptor,” the curator explains.
As an example, he cites the sculpture The Walker, a walking figure with a ball instead of a head, which was created in 1992 in a traditional way. For the Prague exhibition, it was cast again from black resin with a shell structure. “The same statue still appears there in a somewhat lost form,” notes Pangrácová.
Michal Gabriel had his sculpture Chodec cast again from black resin with a shell structure. | Photo: Ondřej Polák
He has in mind a spectacular installation called The Carpet. The floor of one room is covered by rows of objects of different heights, which were created in virtual space by moving the Walker along the height axis and then producing them in a 3D printer. This was followed by casting the prints in polymer. “Thanks to digital tools, a completely new optical object was created that would not have been possible to produce in imagination,” thinks Pangrácová.
Once again, the Pedestrian appears in the exhibition in a very small format as part of a kind of landscape still life. “The walker thus shows different approaches in creation. It was first created by traditional modeling in clay and then by transformation in digital modifications,” summarizes the curator.
The exhibition in Špálov’s gallery also brings closer Gabriel’s never-before-seen microworld, which was once again made possible by digital sculpture. The curator calls the small landscape objects, mostly cubic in shape, diorama, as scenes that give the impression of reality are called. “Until now, sculptors have only dealt with the landscape in the case of relief, and mostly in the background, but here we encounter the landscape as a theme,” he points out.
In addition to detailed sections of nature, most often forests, Gabriel’s dioramas feature fascinating figures the size of Lego figures, but with almost microscopic details. “He is fascinated by the possibility of detail. At the beginning of his career, he did not have these possibilities,” adds Pangrácová.
The exhibition also brings Gabriel’s microworld closer, which was made possible by digital sculpture. | Photo: Ondřej Polák
He was close to horses
Many of Michal Gabriel’s works can be seen in public spaces. Most in Prague, where he comes from. Already in the 1990s, he designed the gates of the Trade Fair Palace, his winged leopard adorns the entrance to the presidential office at Prague Castle.
In Dejvice, his bronze horses swim in a water cascade. Cheetah herders were placed in the animal enclosure in the zoo, and two winged red deer are hung in the narrow alley between Špork Palace and the neighboring house in Hybernská street. In Park na Petřiny there is a statue of Branching, which is a monument to the inventor of contact lenses, Otto Wichterle.
Michal Gabriel designed, for example, the gates of the Trade Fair Palace in Prague. | Photo: CTK
He designed a fountain for Hradec Králové on Masaryk Square, another for Mlada Boleslav. His muscular angel with a pyramid instead of a head looks down from the cornice of the bank building in Opava, in Karlovy Vary there is an equestrian statue of Charles IV. In addition, Michal Gabriel invented a granite hat as a tombstone for the singer Michal Tučný.
One of the most prominent contemporary Czech sculptors could easily have become an ecologist and horse breeder. In his school years, he started riding them in Prague’s Řeporyje at the Hucul Club, where they tried to save an endangered species. “My life before the academy was focused on saving horses and nature. I was close to the ideas of the Greens, I learned about Greenpeace events, but in the end something told me that I should devote myself to art,” he recalls in a comprehensive interview for the public archive Pámeť národa.
After primary school, where he was one of the four-wheelers, he chose to study joinery. “That’s where I breathed freely for the first time. Everything was new, everything was different and I was satisfied. I studied and went to finish my high school diploma at the School of Applied Arts in Žižkov,” he describes his gradual inclination towards art.
In 1982, he began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts. There he met Jiří David and Stanislav Diviš, who organized unofficial exhibitions called Konfrontace. He soon joined them. One of the officially unauthorized demonstrations ended in a conflict with the school management. Gabriel was also punished, who was forced to finish his studies a year earlier.
Michal Gabriel could easily become an ecologist. “My life before the academy was directed towards saving horses and nature,” he says. | Photo: Zdeněk Němec / MF DNES + LN / Profimedia.cz
Overcome the crisis
For a living, he became the night watchman of the Troja castle. He also earned extra money as an assistant to the artist Kurt Gebauer, who also gave him valuable sculpting training. “Kurt showed me other materials and forms with which to work. I was always more of a processual type, and not conceptual. We both worked and the talkative Gebauer taught me, which suited me,” he says.
After the academy, he co-founded the group Tvrdohlaví. “There could have been many more artists, but those who had just finished school were chosen. We did not want to threaten those who did not yet have a diploma,” explains the selection of the staff of the later very well-known group, in which graduates of AVU and UMPRUM met. In addition to David and Diviš, among them were František Skála, Jaroslav Róna, Petr Nikl, Čestmír Suška, Stefan Milkov, Zdeněk Lhotský and Václav Marhoul.
For the Memory of the Nation, the sculptor also remembers Palach’s week or the demonstrations in November 1989. “My wife at the time, Milada, was an activist, and if she hadn’t been pregnant and we didn’t have little Maruška, she would have been on everyone. That’s how I had to go there,” he mentions.
But he was absent from the most famous protest on November 17 on Národní trida. He went home to bathe his daughter. He was scolded by the woman for not staying. “The other day, David Černý called me that someone had been killed at Národní. That was a very strong emotion,” he says, referring to the misinformation that was circulating at the time.
After the Velvet Revolution, the Hardheads disbanded, whose meaning was lost during the discovery of social freedom in the hectic 1990s. “Stubborn are still a brand. We are officially finished and no longer hold regular meetings, but we are still basically connected,” states Gabriel.
Michal Gabriel (on an archive picture from 2012) co-founded the group Tvrdohlaví. | Photo: Tomáš Škoda
In the new conditions, he became a sought-after author, winning many anonymous competitions for the realization of sculptures in public space. In 1995, he won the Jindřich Chalupecký Prize, he started teaching at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Technical University in Brno, where he still runs the studio. In the years 2007 to 2011, he was also dean there.
Gabriel joined the studio after Vladimír Preclík, who built the faculty. “I also had a crisis, I wanted to quit school. But we started focusing on 3D technologies associated with sculpture, and today we are connected with, for example, the SVA school in New York,” concludes Michal Gabriel for the Memory of the Nation.
The current exhibition in Špálov’s gallery shows the results of his digital preoccupation. Works created with the help of computer tools are admirable. But there is no shame in admitting that less polygon meshes and more manual work with clay can feel warmer and closer to the viewer.