BIOGRAPHY
Jiří Anderle (*1936 Pavlíkov) was meant to become a miner in 1951. It was the Cold War and the communist regime needed coal. Luckily, his drawing teacher recognised his talent and arranged a fine-art scholarship for him. At weekends, he played in a village band and the events that occurred during the dances became the impetus for his first cycle entitled Village Dances, which he graduated from the academy with. Over the next eight years, he travelled around half the world as a stagehand and later as an actor-mime with the famous Black Light Theatre Prague. Experiences from this human comedy are still intertwined in his work. After the Prague Spring in 1968, he worked as a pedagogue at the High School of Applied Arts in Prague. In 1973, during the period of the harshest normalisation, he was supposed to receive a professorship, but he refused to join the Czechoslovak Communist Party and subsequently left the school. The totalitarian regime required foreign currency and so Anderle’s work was able to be exported to the West. From Galerie Baukunst Köln it spread to the collections of American and European museums. Cruel Game for a Man was called one of the most important works of the 1970s by the New York Art News magazine. His anti-war Illusion and Reality cycle was exhibited in the Central Exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1982. Two years later, the Swedish National Museum in Stockholm hosted an exhibition for him. His graphic art has received 38 awards at international biennales. As the Memory of Nations states, all of these international successes were censored by the “Normalisation” regime. His Appassionata humana cycle of eighty drawings has been published in book form as an artistic accompaniment to Václav Havel’s essay A Word about Words after the November Revolution. In 1996, the National Gallery in Prague hosted an exhibition for him and the President of the Republic awarded him a Medal for services to the area of culture in 2006. He received the Trebbia International Award for in 2013 for artistic achievement.
Jiří ANDERLE (*1936)
Closed doors from the Spaces cycle, undated
coloured drypoint
49,5 x 48 cm, marked 1/1, signed JIŘÍ ANDERLE
This motif is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.