“I use ordinary, unremarkable materials, clearly classified from our everyday point of view. I touch them, I shape them, I put them into other clear and ordinary relationships, proportions, stories that become grey as soon as I leave them. Non-objective communicators, objects that wait to be touched, a more fixed gaze that, through the rational structure of a particular place, defined and marked by the passing experience, penetrates into unknown structures and grids unmarked by an instructed three-dimensionality…” (VM)

The sculptor Vojtěch Míča (b. 1966) is one of the outstanding personalities of the generation whose entry onto the art scene in the Czech environment is connected with the dynamic period of the 1990s, i.e. at the same time with the period of visibility in the international context. His early handwriting, determined by expression and the theme of memory of place, was soon enriched by minimalist and post-minimalist morphology. A fundamental characteristic of his work was formed – the presence of two parallel, seemingly disparate lines of expression. The contemporary span of the whole thus encompasses the industrial mechanics of a concrete casting, the organicity of hand-worked wood or stone, and the amorphous elementality of plastic matter. Míča’s assemblages of imprints of shards of reality report, as if dispassionately, on its current state, but they are full of the emotional and intellectual power of value reflection. In addition to his sculptural work, Míča has long been a teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts – after graduating from the Monumental Art Studio of A. Veselý, he worked as an assistant in the studio of H. Demartini and then J. Zeithamml, and since 2015 he has been the head of the Studio of Figurative Sculpture and Medals.

Míča’s monograph is above all a thorough pictorial account of many years of continuous sculptural work. Its structure is not strictly chronological; it reflects the creative principles themselves. The rhythm of its structuring is based on a combination of concentrated pictorial foci – such as participation in a symposium at New York’s Socrates Sculpture Park in 1997, presentations at Sculpture Grande in Prague in 2006 and Sculpture by the Sea in Sydney in 2009, or, for example, the 2019 exhibition with Ivan Pinkava, Vital Collapse, at Prague’s Kampa Museum – and an open variety of materials used, sculpture locations, and inspirational photographs. The pictorial units are accompanied by texts by Vojtěch Míča (including English translations). The monograph also includes, for example, interviews with P. Vaňous (2014) and I. Mladičová (2019). This is the first publication to present Vojtěch Míča’s sculptures, realisations, drawings and sketches in the breadth and intensity of a retrospective format.

Editors: Vojtěch Míča, Iva Mladičová

Texts: Vojtěch Míča, Iva Mladičová, Petr Vaňous

Czech and English

Photography: Radek Dětinský, Tomáš Hulík, Vojtěch Míča, Ivan Pinkava, Martin Polák, Catherine Taveron, Marek Volf

Graphic Design and typesetting: Michal Slejška

Printing: Tiskárna Daniel s.r.o.

Published by the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague 2019

690 CZK

Vojtěch Míča. Gesto, otisk, paměť (Vojtěch Míča. Gesture, Imprint, Memory)