Vlasta Prachatická

Vlasta Prachatická (27 November 1929 – 27 April 2022) was a Czech portrait sculptor, honorary member of the British Society of Portrait Sculptors.

After the war, she spent a year at the Higher Industrial School of Sculpture and Stonemasonry in Hořice, where her teacher was Myslbek's pupil Prof. Jaroslav Plichta.

In 1946–1951 she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in the studio of Professor Otakar Španiel.

Her graduation Portrait of mother, exhibited in 1951, was purchased by the National Gallery.

In 1952 she acquired an apartment in Prague 7, Nad Královskou oborou 23, which she partly used as a studio.

In 1952, she took part in a joint exhibition at the Academy in Berlin and in 1957 in a joint exhibition of five artists in the Aleš Hall of the Umělecká beseda, prepared by the art historian František Matouš.

In 1953 she married the sculptor Stanislav Kolíbal.

Their daughter Markéta Prachatická (born 1953), is an artist, their son Pavel Kolíbal (born 1956), is an architect.

This circle included the art historian František Matouš, who curated the exhibition of young artists at Umělecká beseda (1957), and his daughter Helena, or the painter Václav Bartovský, one of the founders of UB 12.

Prachatická was always keenly interested in modern and classical music and her friends included some well-known musicians and composers (Pavel Bořkovec, Karel Balling).

In an attempt to capture the likeness of a person as truthfully as possible, she returned to some of her portraits several years later.

In the 1960s she became a member of the UB 12 group and exhibited at all its exhibitions until 1965.

The members of UB 12 mostly studied at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, where prevailed a freer creative spirit than at the Academy and their interest in modern art also influenced Vlasta Prachatická.

She first modelled a portrait of her uncle, the cellist Karel Pravoslav Sádlo, in 1961, but she later destroyed the study herself and did not reach a final portrait until 1985.

"I have always been interested only in the human face. However, I am not only concerned with expressing the one to whom it belongs. For a few thousand years, actually, people have been interested in it, and in that time, the external changes are not so obvious. We still find types of some ancient portraits around us. But my point is to express, by all artistic means, the head that belongs to our time."

In 1967 she was invited to join an exhibition of five sculptors at the Václav Špála Gallery (Pacík, Zoubek, Kmentová, Vinopalová, Prachatická) and represented Czechoslovakia at the Sculpture Biennale in Middelheim, Belgium.

She won the competition for a portrait of Jan Masaryk for the entrance hall of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia the bust was never installed.

In 1968 she accompanied Stanislav Kolíbal on his study stay in Vence.

Thanks to Kolíbal's scholarship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), she spent the years 1988 and 1989 in Berlin.

Thanks to the support of the Calder Foundation, she spent half a year in Saché, France in 1992.

Since 2006 she has been an honorary member of the British Society of Portrait Sculptors.

Vlasta Prachatická lived and worked in Prague.

Since her student days she has been working on sculptural portraits.

Initially, she portrayed well-known people from her surroundings - her mother, her father, her friend, Daisy Mrázek.

She started from the classical principles concerning surface modelling as formulated by leading sculptors: Despiau - "even the smallest part of a sculpture's surface must have a life of its own", Rodin - "the sculptor, like the builder, kneads and models light and shadow", or Giacometti - "heads are matter in constant motion, a mutable form, never quite graspable".

She avoided psychologising and formal stylisation of portraits, but was aware of the significant relationship between the anatomical structure of the skull and the relief representation of the face, which is an expression of the tension of skin and muscles.

She was inspired by the impressionist modelling of Medardo Rosso and the balance of Charles Despiau's works, which remain faithful to the subject without suppressing artistic imagery.

The closest Czech sculptor to her was Josef Kaplický, whose portrait reflected the legacy of the avant-garde personified by Otto Gutfreund.

The works of her mature period were inspired by the expressive modelling of Marino Marini and the abstracted conception of portraiture by Alberto Giacometti, based on sensory perceptions and emotional stirrings.

The modelling of the face in clay, in particular, lacks luminous qualities and thus affects the likeness of the sitter, while the bronze cast is "too definitive" and at the same time the deadliest.

Prachatická therefore prefers the plaster cast, which for her is a real and living original.

Moreover, the plaster can be modified or finished with polychromy.

Consistently working on portraits meant the need to get into the personal background and consider the nature and characteristics of the person being portrayed.

This was easier in the case of people with whom she and Stanislav Kolíbal were friendly.