Michal Trpák

Michal Trpák was born in 1982 in České Budějovice and still lives in nearby Nové Hodějovice. He studied at the St Agnes of Bohemia Secondary School of Applied Arts in Český Krumlov and then sculpture at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague in Professor Jiří Beránek’s studio, gaining his master’s degree in 2007. During his studies he completed placements at the Taideinstituutti in Lahti (Finland) and at the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver (Canada). He completed his doctorate at the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica (defended in 2012).

Trpák is the founder of the Art in the City festival, which has run officially in České Budějovice since 2008. The impulse was the installation of his diploma work Humanoids on Lannova třída in 2007, after which the city itself approached him with an offer to work together. The number of participating towns has grown steadily — in 2013 Hluboká nad Vltavou joined České Budějovice, and Veselí nad Lužnicí followed from 2016. Since 2015 he has also curated the Sculpture Line festival in Prague.

In his own work Trpák dislikes the limits of genre and constantly crosses them — he makes habitable sculptures, pictures that work as both relief and sculpture, and sculptures sunk in a flooded quarry. Among his remarkable works are Prvok — the first Czech habitable sculpture 3D printed from concrete — and the sculpture Lumbricina by the cycle path near the Kaufland in České Budějovice, showing an earthworm emerging from the ground as a metaphor for the underground heat distribution of the city’s heating network.

He has summed up his philosophy by saying that a city is a functional, rational space that it is important to enter with emotions and new stories, which are food for the soul and the mind.