Information
Year: 1990
Size: 20.6 x 21.0 cm
Type: Color etching, Photogravure, Aquatint, Drypoint
The structure of the city
"The city inspired me, but for a long time I didn't realize what would come of it.
I liked what I had already liked about Prague in my youth, the structure of the city."
(Pravoslav Sovak, 2014, in: Ulrike Lorenz (ed.): Sovak clear visions[s]. Catalogue Raisonné 1995-2016. catalog of the exhibition Kunsthalle Mannheim 2016, p. 34)
Inspired by America
The "Walls" group of works from 1990 and the following years are characterized by densely packed, vertically staggered, sometimes almost transparent-looking building and window structures made of light and dark colors that are both light and shadow. Pravoslav Sovak found the inspiration for this during his numerous stays in American cities with their typical skyscrapers of different heights and widths. Sovak's new condensed view of the city and its geometric tectonics - as a counterpoint to the expansive desert landscape - results in color etchings that are excellently balanced in terms of both color and composition, almost abstract in appearance, and which increasingly draw on his own photographs.
Without sky and horizon
The deserted city view of Walls II, created in extreme close-up, without sky or horizon, fascinates with its aesthetic order and elegant appearance. At the same time, however, it is accompanied by a latent "anonymous melancholy" of metropolitan atmosphere. Pravoslav Sovak's technical mastery and profound mastery of content, which always strives for perfect harmony between form and statement, becomes a poetic, timeless icon of an American metropolis in this enchanting small-format sheet.
©Martina Kral, 2023
English 
German 
Czech