František Skála

* 1956

  • “At high school I already had a narrower circle of friends whom I stayed friends with for years to come. And we did things which from today’s perspective seem rather incomprehensible. For instance, as it was impossible to travel to the West, we would instead go every summer to the Bulgarian seaside, eight years in a row. That was an unforgettable experience which probably heavily influenced my career. We would always live there for three weeks as cavemen – naked, in some area where there were few tourists. In fact, we walked through the whole seaside and picked two or three spots. We lived there as outlaws, hidden from the Bulgarian snitches and the police which was after us because we didn’t have an accommodation stamp in our passports. We managed to vegetate there like that. And the experience of living at the seashore in what was back then a fairly deserted spot was completely amazing.”

  • “Suddenly there was a lot of hatred coming from the underground. It was all rather disputable. For instance, that Halík who managed Lidový dům (a palace in downtown Prague) where we had our first exhibition was obviously a member of the Communist Party. As far as I know, after the revolution he became a rector of the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. He was a Party member but he tried to do things there. There were two options – either underground, or efforts to do it on some official platform. This sparked a lot of hatred and senseless gossip. I myself had no remorse. It can’t be said that I collaborated with someone. My goal was to present work of good quality. Also, to be frank I did not find the art works created by the underground very good. But perhaps this was a result of the terrible depression which had always prevailed there.”

  • “Me and my friend from school created some collapsible as-if-assault-rifles which we then carried in a violin case, imitating some movie we saw. We even had the screw-on silencers in those small violin cases. Equipped with this we would organize expeditions downtown. There, we would always enter a bank and then walk around until somebody sent us off. I specifically recall one spot in Lucerna Palace. We would walk up the stairs and then lay out those cases, screw our guns together and lurk there as gangsters. Then we would pack them up again. Usually we took tram No. 26 downtown. At that time, these were old trams – a front carriage with two platforms and in the back a tow car with the ticket inspector. He would regularly validate people’s tickets but if one rode on the platform of the first car, he wouldn’t get checked at all. We made marks for how many times we have taken this or that tram because some of them were our favorite ones. For instance, I remember No. 2144 to this day.”

  • “Over the time I was slowly returning to my free art works – at the moments of emptiness and inner pressure from sitting down all day and doing stuff. I began as a sort of a Sunday artist, saying to myself that I would do my own works during the weekends when I could relax. There was a moment of self-reflection, a breakthrough when I fully liberated myself from all the school clichés and the work I was trying to do, going back to childhood and the freest possible design. It was in fact very brutal as far as the media and the tools I used are concerned. I had real fits of happiness doing that. I once again began working with wood, but no longer as a carver who would be doing something very delicate there. I started to use an axe, a hammer and a screwdriver with which I dag on purpose to approach this naïve, sincere design, extracting something from the material. The topics followed suit. There was a tickle of absurdity there which I had felt with the arrival of post-modernism. Obviously, I had some information about what was going on in the West. But at the same time I was really surprised to feel the pull of the era… The Iron Curtain did not work in this respect. It was something which I had inside me, which I didn’t need to see in foreign catalogues.”

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    Praha, 13.04.2015

    (audio)
    délka: 02:13:13
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Fates of Artists in Communist Czechoslovakia
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Playing games is a very serious job

František Skála
František Skála
zdroj: Pamět Národa - Archiv

František Skála was born on 7 February 1956 in Prague. His father was a painter and his mother a choreographer. He had spent his early years at the periphery of Prague‘s Strašnice quarter where he and his friends played various games. As a child he started drawing, at elementary school he published an illustrated magazine and drew comic strips. He was also the leader of a school gang and as such was always running into trouble. After finishing elementary school he enrolled at a woodcarving high school in the Žižkov quarter where he had also met his future wife. Every summer, he and his friends would go to the Bulgarian seaside where they lived for several weeks as cavemen. This experience influenced František Skála‘s later work. In 1974 he and his friends established a secret artists‘ grouping BKS which remains active to this day. Following high-school he unsuccessfully applied to the Academy of Fine Arts. Instead, he had worked for a year as a maintenance man. Then he got accepted to study animated film at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. He had rather devoted his time to painting and sculpture, though. From graduation up until mid-1990s he had made a living as an illustrator. Meanwhile, he was gradually returning to his own art works. In the mid-1980s he had his first solo exhibition and in 1987 co-founded the artists‘ group Tvrdohlaví („the Pig-headed“). After the Velvet Revolution he has had several tenths of solo exhibitions both in the Czech Republic and abroad. In 1993 he represented CR at the Venice Biennale. His 2004 exhibition in Prague‘s Rudolfinum Gallery became the most successful exhibition of that year. He is a member of the Sklep Theater and a vocal-dance group Tros Sketos. He is married and has a daughter and a son.