On July 12, 2023, the painter and sculptor Zbynek Sekal would have turned 100. The Kampa Museum in Prague, the Museum Liaunig in Neuhaus/Suha and the Sprengel Museum Hannover are dedicating three exhibitions and a joint book to the important artist of the Czech avant-garde, providing insight into his oeuvre - drawings, paintings, collages, material pictures, wire objects as well as sculptures in bronze, stone, plaster and wood.
Sekal's multifaceted oeuvre cannot be separated from his eventful life story, which was marked early on by violence, imprisonment and isolation: in 1941, the politically active 18-year-old was arrested and interned in Prague's Pankrác prison, and later in the Theresienstadt and Mauthausen concentration camps. The suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 prompted Sekal to emigrate. A DAAD scholarship took the artist first to Berlin, and in September 1970 he came to Vienna, where he lived and worked until his death in 1998.