COURAGE

connecting collections

Zbyněk Sekal was a Czech sculptor, painter and translator. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 for his involvement in an illegal communist youth group and imprisoned in the concentration camps in Terezín and Mauthausen until the end of the war. He began studying at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague in 1945, though he did not complete his studies and worked as a press agent and later as an editor at Svoboda publishing house. At first he devoted himself mainly to painting and then from the mid-1950s to sculpture – the focal point of his interest was the figure, particularly the bust and head portrayed in an expressive manner. He lived in Bratislava from 1953–1958, working as a translator. He exhibited his work with the group Máj 57 (May 57). 1965 saw his first solo exhibition at the Václav Špála Gallery. After the Soviet occupation in 1968, he first of all emigrated to Berlin and Dusseldorf, then in 1970 he settled permanently in Vienna. He taught at the Academy of Art in Stuttgart from 1972 to 1974. In 1984 he received the City of Vienna Prize for sculpture.

Jan Sekera was an art historian and gallerist. From the 1960s until 1987 he was the head of the Benedikt Rejt Gallery. Sekera was never politically active. He was the author of the collection system and used his wits to find ways for the gallery to purchase unofficial art even after 1968. Sekera describes how he composed committees in order to make the purchase of unofficial artists possible. An example of his unorthodox approach is how he was able to move money designated for road repairs into an art fund. In the 1990s, he became the head of České muzeum výtvarných umění (Czech Museum of Fine Arts).

Rostyslav Semkiv is a Ukrainian writer, literary critic, translator and publisher. He has obtained his PhD in philology from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Kyiv. From 2003 to date, he is director of the Smoloskyp publishing house in Kyiv. He directs the digitization projects of the Smoloskyp collection, and organizes national exhibitions, promoting the collection to university students, secondary school students and the general public.

Halyna Sevruk was born in 1929 in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. She was a sculptor, graphic artist, ceramicist, and member of the sixtiers movement (shestydesiatnyky) of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Sevruk family moved to Kharkiv, Ukraine shortly after Halyna’s birth, a city where she spent much of her childhood. In 1945, they moved to Kyiv, where her father Silvester, had found work as an architect. Two years later, Sevruk began studying at a local art school, which she finished in 1949. Ten years later, she completed her studies at the Kyiv Art Institute, where she befriended the artist Alla Horska, a fellow sixtier. Together with Horska, Opanas Zalyvakha, Liudmila Semykina, and Halyna Zubchenko created the stained glass window at Kyiv University known as “Shevchenko. Mother” in 1964 to commemorate the centenary of the Ukrainian poet bard Taras Shevchenko’s birth. Censors destroyed the window, due to its unconventional style and use of national themes. Sevruk also created the ceramic painting that is one of the Sixtier’s Museum’s featured items, which depicts Ivan Svitlychny, Vasyl Stus and other writers as martyrs, persecuted for their words and the pursuit of truth.