Boudník

Author: Vladislav Merhaut

This unique book featuring a complete graphic inventory contains over 950 reproductions of all Boudník's graphic works and a number of visual comparisons, as each piece of his graphic art can be seen as a separate original. His position in the Czech art scene is solitary, and on the international stage of abstract experimentation he finds himself amongst real pioneers. He preceded not only tachism, and that without knowing the work of American abstractionists (led by Jackson Pollock), but also informalism (Art Informel) as well. He stood at the birth of his own artistic style, known as explosionism, and was one of the first to create happenings in an urban space. And he achieved all of this within the discontinuity of the reality of cultural isolation at the time, in a period of the strictest censorship when he maintained complete freedom over his own imagination. The book accentuates the colourful variants of individual prints, known as structural and active graphics, which in their own way change the view of his experimental work in a given context. The presented inventory is a lifelong work of Boudník's friend, Vladislav Merhaut, who documented the often inaccessible works concentrated in this compendium during his lifetime. Boudník became a legend not only for his contemporaries, whom he inspired to create films of the so-called new wave of the 1960s (Věra Chytilová) and books (The Gentle Barbarian by Bohumil Hrabal), but he is also a legend that fascinates the art world still to this day.

Product information

Author: Vladislav Merhaut
Publisher: Eminet
Language: Czech
Year of issue: 2020
Size: 240 x 300 mm
Binding: Hardcover
Number of pages: 512