At present Michal Sedlák is mainly involved in creating land-art projects, an artistic form which develops the ideas of conceptual artists from the middle of the sixties. Though the relationship of these works to those of Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Richard Long, Hamish Fulton and others is undeniable, Sedlák’s approach to this medium is temperamentally different. It is as though Sedlák has brought the old tradition of the artistic formation of the landscape and natural formations from its conceptual episode back to the womb of creative art, fantastic invention and exciting fabulation.
Amongst his works we find drawings of large and technically demanding visions, such as the modification of the site of the former monument to Stalin in Prague, including the building of a restaurant and an extensive sculptural creation made from vegetation, or a design for the transformation of the mined hill in České Středohoří into the form of an egg in a frying pan – a “bovine eye”. As well as these there is a host of projects for works of smaller dimensions, the realisation of which is completely possible as has already been shown in two cases.
Sedlák’s creative approach could be characterised as a sensitivity for the living surface of the earth and for the stories which populate it. His landscapes are an attempt to add elements of pleasure, game, fantasy, stories and the sensitive updating of a broad cultural context to the functional formation of a landscape.
As well as landscape projects Sedlák has created installations for public urban premises, works woven from twigs, and we also find woven tapestry in the list of his works.
In 1997 Sedlák created two projects for the exhibition “The Work of Art in Public Space”. Floater involved a thirty-metre long human figure with outstretched arms lying flat in a shallow stream of the Vltava rapids in Troja, Prague. The sculpture, which was to be been made out of stone and live vegetation, was presented by a convincingly detailed model immersed in flowing water. The second project took the form of an artificial island – mountains inside which an Archimedean screw was concealed driven by a stream of water and moving a ball to the top.
Sedlák’s work differs from the modest, sensitive works of Long or Fulton. It consists of a conceptual realisation of the viewer’s experience which has a “revolutionary” character, i.e. it opens a new model of the relationship of the subject to the world as such. As opposed to the conceptual works of Land Art and Earth Art the contents of Sedlák’s works move around the surface of the world and the surface of human experience. They recount stories, by which they make a connection to the cultural heritage and address current themes of contemporary discourse regarding questions relating to environmental protection and the aesthetic values of the landscape.
