Pavel Opočenský

Sculptor and jeweller, born on 7 August 1954 in Karlovy Vary. He is the youngest son of the actor Gustav Opočenský and the actress Františka Horáková, and the grandson of the poet and journalist Gustav Roger Opočenský. At fifteen he began training as a metal chaser in a relative’s metalworking shop in České Budějovice, where he restored objects from churches and museums and became interested in jewellery and design. He completed the costume jewellery programme at the secondary technical school in Jablonec nad Nisou (1972) and the metal and stone working programme at the Secondary School of Applied Arts for Jewellery in Turnov (1974). He was among the avant-garde jewellers of the 1970s experimenting with new materials, especially plastic. In 1979 he signed Charter 77 and shortly afterwards emigrated to Germany on a forged passport; in Munich he briefly attended the Academy of Fine Arts and began working with stone, and two years later he left for the USA, where he worked as a sculptor, jeweller and art critic.

He returned from exile in the early 1990s and, alongside jewellery, began working systematically in stone sculpture (granite, syenite). He took part in the jewellery symposia Kremnica ’91 and Jewellery and Gemstone in Turnov (1991) and in the International Sculpture Symposium in Hořice (1992). In 1994 his exhibition of sculpture in syenite and granite was the very first public presentation of the newly founded Rudolfinum Gallery. In 1997 he founded the Kotelna Gallery of Modern Jewellery in Prague and was an active curator of jewellery exhibitions (Czech Studio Jewellery 1997, 1998; Eros — Modern Czech Jewellery 1999). In 1999 he was one of two Czechs to take part in an international touring exhibition of jewellery in honour of Madeleine Albright. For his 65th birthday, in 2019 the Goldschmiedehaus in Hanau, Germany, held a large retrospective of his jewellery and sketches. His best-known work is the monument to the Čapek brothers on náměstí Míru in Prague-Vinohrady.

He has exhibited at the Klatovy / Klenová Gallery, among other places. Note: in 2004 and 2005 he was sentenced to a total of seven and a half years in prison for the sexual abuse of underage Roma girls.