Čestmír Suška

Čestmír Suška was born on 4 January 1952 in Prague. He grew up in Prosek and Vysočany. After failing to get into architecture at the Czech Technical University he entered a specialist art school with a focus on sculpture. In 1974 he married the artist Naďa Rawová and in the same year began studying sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he remained until 1980.

He met the theatre director Ctibor Turba, for whom he made masks for circus-flavoured productions. In 1981 he and his wife held art symposia in Malechov near Klatovy, out of which grew their theatre Kolotoč, which Suška led from 1980 to 1988 — it was immortalised in Tomáš Vorel’s film “Prague 5” (1988). In that same year he dissolved the theatre in order to devote himself fully to sculpture, and co-founded the group Tvrdohlaví (with František Skála, Jaroslav Róna, Jiří David and others).

The late years of Communist “normalisation” produced the sculptures Executioner (1988, Vojan Gardens) and Fear, inspired by police violence during Palach Week. After 1989 he made public commissions such as Pig Out for a Walk in Roztyly and Great Spiral by the school in Nové Butovice.

After a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (1995) and a residency at Sculpture Space in Utica, USA (1999), in 2000 he founded Studio Bubec in Prague-Řeporyje — an open space for residencies, workshops and the annual Art Safari festival. During a stay at the Vermont Studio Center he discovered discarded steel tanks as a material and began perforating them and cutting patterns inspired by lace and folk ornament; this gave rise to the cycle Abandoned Dwellings, with exhibitions in Karlín, at DOX and in Plzeň. He has also exhibited in the USA and lectured at American schools.

In 2015 he and his wife Arjana Shameti founded the Suška–Shameti foundation in support of visual art, and in 2017 the festival m3/Art in Space, of which he is artistic director.