Karel Malich

Karel Malich's means of expression are of a wide range – his favoured media include painting, drawing, graphic art and the creation of artefacts. The linking factor in all of the above media is his relationship with nature and landscape, mainly within the surroundings of his native Holice, along with his inner experiences.

From 1945 to 1949, he studied the teaching of art and aesthetics at the Pedagogical Faculty at Charles University in Prague. From 1950 to 1953, he went on to study graphic art under the tutorship of Vladimír Silovský at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He has been a member of the Association of Czech Graphic Artists HOLLAR since 1958, and was a member of the Křižovatka group (1963-1968).

Since his very early landscape paintings in the early 1960s, he has freed himself from the constraints of observing reality, and turned to the abstract composition of his pictures. As well as painting, he worked with collage that lead him on to radical, monochrome relief-work whose surface, created from corrugated cardboard, reflects the sensation of viewing landscape from above, e.g. Krajina (Bílý relief) / Landscape (White Relief) from 1963.

In the mid-1960s, his work came close to Constructivism tendencies and he created a range of relief-work in which he explored the possibilities of depicting the penetration, traverse and streaming of energy through space. His interest in nature returned to his artwork at the beginning of the 1970s. He created models of clouds suspended in space which consequently resulted in his creation of wire artefacts.
This work with wire, usually bound with coloured thread, has lead him to create sculptures without mass, functioning like spontaneous drawings in space, inspired by visions of energy streaming in a landscape. Malich's 1976 spatial sculpture entitled Ještě jedno pivo? (One More Beer?), marks a change in these concepts, and captures the seemingly banal reality of a given moment from the point of view of the artist. The gradual realization of his own position in time and space continues with the artist's intense inner experiences – the experience of seeing light in his body, which in 1977, initiated the creation of the sculpture Vnitřní světla I a II (Inner Light I and II).

He records his inner visions and light experiences in sculpture work, but also in gouache and pastels which have been the main domain of his work since the second half of the 1980s.

He returns to the countryside of his native Holice in his autobiographical prose Od tenkrát do teď tenkrát, 1979-1980 (From That Time to Now That Time), published in book form in 1994.
 

1963
Černý relief (Black Relief)

1973–1974
Kosmické vejce (Cosmic Egg)

1976
Hranice vidění (Threshold of Seeing)

1976
Pozoruji oblohu (I Study the Sky)

1976
Pootočil jsem hlavu (I Turned My Head)

1979
Viděl jsem trhlinu v prostoru (I Saw a Crack in Space)

1976–1980
Já a ten jehož potkávám (I and He Whom I Meet)

1979–1985
Krajina s věčnem (Landscape with the Eternal)