Vladimír Škoda is a sculptor who works mainly with metal. He was born in 1942 in Prague. At the age of six, when his father died, his uncle, the blacksmith and painter Josef Vacke, became his stepfather. Thanks to him, Škoda learned how to use a hammer and had intensive contact with metal from childhood.
From 1957 to 1960, he studied to be a lathe and milling machine operator at the Apprentice School of the Českomoravská-Kolben-Daněk (ČKD) company in Slany, and mastered other metal processing crafts. He had been involved in artistic creation since childhood, and during his apprenticeship this process intensified. “I was seventeen years old and forever dancing. Most often we went to the Reduta to dance the Charleston. One day the dancing went up in a puff of smoke, I stayed at home and started drawing. Suddenly I was hooked.”[1] From then on, Škoda devoted himself to this activity and by the end of his studies at ČKD, the idea of applying to the Academy of Fine Arts was already forming in his mind. He was allowed to do so for the first time in 1960, but ended up failing the entrance examination. Between 1963 and 1967, he repeatedly applied to the Academy of Fine Arts and UMPRUM, but without success. “It went on like this until 1967, I applied seven times,” Škoda recalls. [2]
Knowing that no one in Czechoslovakia was interested in his work, Škoda decided to emigrate to Paris. “At that time it was clear to me that nobody wanted me here. I became interested in stage design, but they didn’t want me there either. I knew I had to change something radically. I bought an exit permit from a young communist allowing me to travel to Paris. I decided that I would go about things like Gutfreund, Kupka, Šíma, Zrzavý and other Czech artists. I’d just leave. Of course, it wasn’t that easy, but following the events of 1968, this was my sole goal and nothing else interested me.”[3] Škoda left for Paris in July 1968. “I lived on stale bread that cut my gums and the cheapest wine for 50 centimes.”[4]
After about a month in France, while walking down the street, he noticed a photograph of Wenceslas Square with a tank on the front page of a Paris newspaper. “At that time I didn’t speak a word of French and naively thought that some film from the Second World War was being shot in Prague. That’s how I walked around Paris for at least two or three days.”[5] After a few days, he met a compatriot who explained the events that had been taking place in Prague and led him to the SOS association set up to help Czechoslovak citizens in exile. Thanks to the huge wave of sympathy that arose in France after August 1968, Škoda was taken in by a French family and granted asylum.
Shortly thereafter, he won a scholarship to the University of Grenoble, where he began to learn French, and then started to study painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Škoda’s works were noticed by the eminent French sculptor César Baldaccini, who headed the sculpture studio and with whom Škoda eventually spent a year of study, during which he gradually abandoned painting and increasingly devoted himself to wire objects. Baldaccini was convinced of the talents of both Škoda and Marie-Claude Brunet, Škoda’s partner and later wife, whom he met at the school, and promoted their works at the prestigious Prix de Rome competition. The newlyweds won the award on their second attempt, and with it a two-year internship in Italy, which launched Škoda’s artistic career. From 1973 to 1975 he worked in Rome at the Villa Medici, where he created a series of sculptures made of iron wire. His work was also featured in his first solo exhibition in Rome at the Primo Piano gallery.
After returning to Paris, Škoda applied several times for professorships at French universities. “So I gave it a try. Once, twice, three times… and the fourth time I was successful.”[6] He was a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre, at the École des Beaux-Arts in Marseille, and finally at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg. During his teaching practice, he had to formulate for himself exactly what it was he was creating, which helped him define the essence of his work: instinct alone no longer sufficed. At this stage, he shifted his attention from wire constructions, which he considered to be a manifestation of drawing, towards matter as such: he began to forge metal. His interest was focused on the inner space of matter. And as is evident in his work, he was interested in mathematics, physics and the inner micro-cosmos of objects. He capitalised on his childhood when, thanks to his uncle, he had learned the craft of blacksmithery, as well as the attention to detail he had acquired as a lathe operator during his apprenticeship years.
Around 1988, he reached a point where, while working with a hammer, anvil, and thus with molten material, he realised that he was working with a form that he could not see: the material to be processed and shaped had to be heated until it was white in the kiln. Such matter, i.e. the energy awakened in the steel by the heat, prevented Škoda from seeing the exact form of the art object created, and the development of his work gradually reached a spherical form. “I give something a shape, but I can’t see it. Somehow, automatically, spontaneously, I approached the shape of a globe, which is not a precise term, the mathematical term sphere is better.”[7] It was around this time that he came across a book by Étienne-Louis Bouillée, an architect of the French Revolution (Architecture, essai sur l’art / Essay on the Art of Architecture), which left a great impression on him. After reading it, he decided to work with the perfect form, namely, the sphere. His work is based on geometric relationships, but these are communicated intuitively. The sphere thus represents the entire universe, the individual cosmic bodies and the ideal bodies according to Plato’s theory.
Another turning point in his work was when he emerged from the interior space of an object to the surface. His forged spheres, which of course had a surface and shape based on the nature of their material, were not perfect in terms of form. So Škoda had the perfect spheres turned on a lathe and then drilled into them, trying to get inside, but “the mass seemed to disappear.”[8] He began to polish the surface of the spheres, taking advantage of the reflection of the world around him, and it was at this time that his fascination with the geometry of curved space materialised. He eventually fitted the inside of the steel spheres with other metals, such as copper, and used grooving and polishing to refine their surface. He was also fascinated by theories of black holes. He consistently focused his attention on astronomy and astrophysics, which, inter alia, describe what a black hole looks like inside. Gradually his artistic activity has shifted to the exact opposite of what he was doing before. Now, he is interested in the shell that reflects outer space. So the spheres no longer had to be full, since Škoda was interested in their surface and the universe around them, the distortion of space, the reflection of the distortion of reality.
The artist’s lifelong inspiration is Jan Kepler and his research activities. Škoda paid tribute to this scientist with his first major exhibition in the Czech Republic in 1995 at the Rudolfinum Gallery in Prague. Here, his project Mysterium Cosmographicum Johannes Kepler was put on display, and the entire exhibition was part of the Constellations project, which was also held in galleries in Strasbourg and Brussels. In 1999, another of his works on the theme of the pendulum was presented at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal at the exhibition Cosmos: du romantique à l’avantgarde, and further pendulum sculptures were presented at the exhibition Riflessi celesti e meccaniche galileane in Pisa in 2004.
Later on, Škoda was inspired by the vibratory and rotational movement of the mirror, and thus managed to obtain a vision of infinity in motion alongside a distorted image of the surrounding world. An important aspect of this work is Miroir du temps (Mirror of Time), a series of vibrating and rotating mirrors produced after 1999 and presented in 2006 at the Specchio del tempo exhibition in Spoleto, Italy, and in 2007 at the Quatrième dimension / Fourth Dimension exhibition at the Trade Fair Palace in Prague.
With the exhibition Espace d’art Contemporain in Colmar, Škoda launched a series of exhibitions in France, Germany and the Czech Republic in 2013. This was accompanied by the monograph de l’intérieur (from the inside), which contains an overview of the artist’s work from the 1990s to the present day. Skoda’s work with metals employs various physical processes and technologies, such as interference, magnetism, polarity and lighting configurations, and his fascination with the cosmos is reflected in much of his work. Drawing on his knowledge, as well as feelings and experiences derived from geometry and mathematics, he shapes the form of his compositions, creating parallels to the cosmic arrangement and using optical effects to build a new space between dimensions. In this way, he achieves a unique crossing of the boundaries of sculptural matter, and his works thus reach out towards other planes, the planes of the cosmic universe.
[1]https://www.pametnaroda.cz/cs/skoda-vladimir-20161220-0, accessed 14 April 2023.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Karolína Jirkalová, Cesta do hmoty a zase zpátky / Journey to Matter and Back Again, interview with Vladimír Škoda, Art&antiques, summer 2007, p. 31.
[8] Ibid., pp. 31–32.
