This abstract artwork called Blecha ("Flea", in Czech) is displayed at the Veletržní National Gallery in Prague and was made by Zbyněk Sekal.

Sekal’s beginnings as an artist coincided with the war. He expressed the harsh experiences he had during the war in art and as a student he came into contact with surrealism. He never orthodoxly embraced this movement, like some of his peers (Mikuláš Medek), and for Sekal surrealism, given its absurdist inclinations, represented a platform that allowed him to address persistent existential questions about the place of man in society. Surrealism thus open up a world of imagination for him, and after 1956 he began to introduce that into a world that consisted of simple, ordinary scenes, leading him to pursue a form of work that reflected the enigmatic realism of the new objectivity. Sekal’s interest in philosophy (which he also translated from German) added to the metaphysical-magical side of his work, an example of which is provided by his painting Little Box (Krabička, circa 1956).

At the same time Sekal also began working in sculpture. At a remove from the academic approaches to resolving the basic questions of sculpture and attempts to process the interwar avant-garde, as a solitaire Sekal modelled unconventional, summarising figurative heads (mainly heads and busts), which were infused with the contemporary sense of disquieting uncertainty and surviving feelings of trauma from the war (Shouting Head /Křičící hlava, 1957; Dead Head / Mrtvá hlava, 1957; Little Bird / Ptáček, 1957). Around 1958 Sekal began moving towards a more abstract form of expression: his sculptures from the series Abode (Obydlí) and Signalling (Návěstí) range from soft contructivist forms to imaginatively absurdist hybrids. (Is it a figure? A geometric construction? Or a surreally constructed dream journal?). Sekal’s work from around the years 1958-1962 is filled with shapes welded together and brought into harmony. It was at the end of this period, for instance, that he created his very abstract sculptures Armchair (Křeslo, 1962) and Head(Hlava, 1963), which reveal him to have been undergoing an unprecedented radicalisation at that time in the sense of freeing shapes into a simple geometric (but not constructivist) forms. Sekal did not, however, continue in this direction, because for a sensitive and existentially preoccupied nature such as his it produced something too cool and exclusive of meaningful contexts.   

This object is part of "Scan The World". Scan the World is a non-profit initiative introduced by MyMiniFactory, through which we are creating a digital archive of fully 3D printable sculptures, artworks and landmarks from across the globe for the public to access for free. Scan the World is an open source, community effort, if you have interesting items around you and would like to contribute, email stw@myminifactory.com to find out how you can help.