Zbyněk Sekal: Beloved Beings. A Gift from the Artist's Estate

This exhibition presents an exceptional gift acquired by the West Bohemian Gallery in Plzeň in 2025 from Marie Christine Sekal (1943-2023), widow of the prominent Czech sculptor, painter, and translator Zbyněk Sekal (1923-1998), who lived in Vienna from 1970 onwards.

The collection of 102 works spans virtually Sekal's entire creative period - from pieces created in the first half of the 1950s through the key works of the 1960s to works produced from the 1970s until his death in exile in 1998. Each period includes seminal pieces, and the artist's diary notes - part of the exhibition - help illuminate them. These notes offer insights into the artist's creative self-reflection, his working process, and his personal dialogue with the materials he found in discarded waste. The exhibition's title derives from this: for Sekal, his materials ("substance") were a collection of living, beloved beings with whom he spoke and who urged him to take them up.

Curated by Marie Klimešová, a leading expert on Sekal's work, the exhibition is conceived as a structured meditation on this gift. The display features Sekal's sculptures, hanging assemblages (so-called composite pictures), and a range of three-dimensional wooden constructions that the artist called boxes, presented alongside selections from his diary reflections. Together, they reveal the inner connections across the stages of the artist's life and his creative themes, as well as the artistic power of this body of work.