Blecha

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).