In 1926 Makovský completed his studies in painting and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Immediately afterwards, he was granted a scholarship by the French government, which enabled him to spend the years 1926-1930 in the studio of Antoine Bourdelle in Paris. After his return to Czechoslovakia, he taught in Zlín; after the end of the Second World War, he was appointed professor at the Faculty of Architecture in Brno, and in 1952 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. At that time, he received a number of public commissions, which was doubtless partly due to his active participation in the resistance against the National Socialist tyranny.
Vincenc Makovský’s artistic oeuvre underwent several important transformations, from Civilism to Cubism and abstraction in the 1920s, and then to Surrealist morphology in the 1930s. The Surrealist phase of Makovsky's mature period includes the 1932 bronze sculpture
Dívčí sen [Dream of a Girl], in which unconscious impulses and psychological automatism are combined with a sophisticated organic form: An egg is embedded on top of a drastically dismembered reclining female torso without head and arms, and with strikingly cut thighs.
This egg becomes the focal point, while the body is transformed into its base. A contrast is created between the large proportions of the fleshy torso and the exaggerated detail on the egg. These characteristics show the sculpture to be the product of one of Makovský's most important creative periods, the phase of an imaginative upsurge. In later years, his realistic perspective became dominant again.
Richard Štipl, for whom the mixing of different formats and the combination of seemingly unrelated motifs are among the characteristic features of his artistic identity, plays with similar creative methods in this exhibition.
DREAM OF A GIRL, 1932
b. 1900 in Nové Město na Moravě, Kingdom of Bohemia
d. 1966 in Brno, Czechoslovakia