Karel Nepraš began his studies at AVU in Prague in 1952 during the repressive Stalinist period. However, he soon found a circle of students (including Jan Koblasa, Bedřich Dlouhý and Jaroslav Vožniak) who resisted the pressure of the time and began to create their own world. There gradually arose a Dadaist-surrealist group of nonconformists, who reacted to the political situation with avowedly absurd initiatives, not only in art, but also in theatre, literature and music. The first such initiative (the first ‘malmuzherciád’) took place on 19 December 1954. Later, in 1957, the group was renamed the Šmidrové after the comic figure of the policeman from the children’s puppet film Kašpárkovy rolničky.
As one of the founders of the Šmidrové Group, during the 1950s Karel Nepraš focused on drawings filled with black humour. He was to continue to draw in a tragicomic, sarcastic spirit the whole of his life. At the end of the 1950s he took up sculpture. The two bronze figures entitled Standing / Stojících of 1959 were not simply an isolated phenomenon in his oeuvre, but an important gesture within the sculpture world at that time. Nepraš was not interested in developing classical sculptural principles, and both works were based more on the aesthetic of his drawings, in which he deformed grotesquely the forms of the figures. While one of the figures is created as a thin cylinder with a smooth surface, the body of the second opens expressively: it is ploughed through with a deep incision. This figure hints at the development of the next stage in Nepraš’s work, the period of the expressive textural treatment of materials that began shortly after 1960. These new sculptures were non-figurative and influenced by the wave of Czech informel artists of the Confrontations circle. They are expressively jagged and their content reacts to the Kafka-like world of hopelessness (Castle / Zámek, 1963-64, Portrait of Řehoř Samsa / Portrét Řehoře Samsy, 1964).
Around 1964 Nepraš discovered the world of assemblage. He created sculptures out of metaů, wire, hosepipe and other banal materials, which he supplemented with textile and smeared with paint (sometimes an aggressively red paint). His sculptures from the cycle Moroa, and the work entitled Large Dialogue / Velký dialog (1966) are among the highlights of Czech sculpture of the time. By linking wire elements, the artist created bizarrely deformed shapes in which the original material loses its legibility. The result is sinewy figures that provoke through their grotesque insistence. The humorous game with materials resonates not only with the aesthetic of parody and strangeness of the Šmidrové Group, but was also a response to the broader generational feeling of the absurdity of life.
After 1970 Nepraš continued to develop the technique of assemblage. Other materials and objects appear, such as various construction fittings, plumbing piles, metal springs, screws, vessels, metal and porcelain insulators, rubber hoses and other plumbing materials. A significant event was Nepraš’s participation in 1969 at the Symposium of Spatial Forms in Ostrava, where he discovered a new material: cast iron. However, he never gave up on the principle of structuring his work from individual parts. His cast iron sculptures, stark in tone, acquired movement: gears, cogs and toothed wheels (Figure with Filling / Figura s náplní, 1969-70, Figural Sculpture – For Walking / Figurální plastika – na šlapání, 1972, Attempted Suicide / Pokus o sebevraždu, 1976-77). Although there is a difference between his work of the 1960s and later works, a strongly grotesque inclination runs through the whole of his oeuvre and is instantly recognisable.
Over the next decades Nepraš worked on an aesthetic of assemblage using different technical materials and objects. Ceramic and porcelain appear more and more alongside metal. The artist moves from expressive figures (Fountain with Sink / Fontána s výlevkou, 1987) to minimalistic figures (Walking / Kráčející, 2000). Ironic hyperbole, expressive deformation and often black humour never disappear and change life into a joke, a joke that is an important element in survival (in each stage of the artist’s own life and that of society as a whole). Karel Nepraš created a very specific language of assemblage sculptures, grotesque figures, and these make him one of the most important representatives of the grotesque in the history of Czech art.
