Jiří Sobotka

Academic sculptor and university teacher, born on 3 December 1955 in Brno. He studied at the Secondary School of Applied Arts in Brno (1971–1975, sculpture) and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (1975–1981). He gained further experience as an assistant at the Faculty of Architecture and the Faculty of Fine Arts of Brno University of Technology; in 2001 he was habilitated in sculpture at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. He teaches at the Secondary School of Art and Design in Brno and at the Faculty of Education of Masaryk University (from 1993 to 1998 he taught in the sculpture studio). He has been a notable figure of the Brno cultural scene since the 1980s. His work follows on from pop art (Lichtenstein, Warhol, Oldenburg): he is fascinated by entirely ordinary, even banal objects — bottles, tubes, computer mice, mushrooms, women’s shoes, car bodies — which he enlarges to larger-than-life scale and enriches with allegorical content, psychological subtext or a formal shift; gentle irony and humour are never far away.

Besides classical materials he works with polystyrene, fibreglass, wax and chocolate. Since 1990 he has had over 30 solo exhibitions, among them Almost Retro (Špilberk Castle, 2015/2016) and an exhibition at the Gallery of the Town of Trutnov (2024).

Works: Appletree — an almost five-metre wooden sculpture on the shore of the Brno reservoir (1998), a sculpture of the poet Jan Skácel below Špilberk (2016, the winning design in the Sculptures for Brno 2015 competition), the Memorial to the Victims of War in Žatčany (2005), four memorial plaques to the victims of the events of 1968 and 1969 (1991) and a memorial plaque to Dr Adolf Kroupa on the House of Art of the City of Brno. Represented in the collections of the Moravian Gallery, the Brno City Museum, the Robert Koch sculpture park in Leipzig, the permanent display at Mikulov Chateau, the Aranđelovac sculpture park in Serbia and the collections of Komerční banka. Awards: the bronze medal of the Ministry of Culture (2017).