In his 82 years, the art theorist and curator Jiří Ševčík passed away

Prague - At the age of 82, Jiří Ševčík passed away on April 2, a theorist, curator of contemporary art, and also a long-time educator at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Petra Švecová from the AVU communication department informed ČTK about this today. Together with his wife Jana, their opinions and perspectives significantly influenced the Czech cultural environment. Many artists, including the previously unknown painters the Vál sisters in the 1980s, became known to the wider public thanks to them.

Jiří Ševčík was born in 1940 in Pardubice. In addition to art theory and criticism, he initially focused on architecture – in the 1960s, he worked as an editor of the magazine Architektura and then, until 1989, as a researcher at the Faculty of Architecture of the Czech Technical University. During that time, he authored several translations and samizdat publications.

In the 1980s, he and his wife Jana expanded their interest to include other artistic disciplines, primarily contemporary painting. Meeting the Vál sisters in Kladno was important for them. The exhibition they organized for them in 1983 in Cheb marked the beginning of the Ševčík couple's curatorial career. They also supported artists from the group Tvrdohlaví in their unconventional work for that time. Since the early 1980s, the Ševčík couple published many texts introducing the concept of postmodernism to Czech audiences.

After 1989, the Ševčík couple became a well-known curatorial and theoretical duo, promoting Czech art abroad by organizing numerous exhibitions of Czech artists in Germany and France. Their position in the Czech scene was further solidified in the 1990s due to the roles they held.

Since 1990, Ševčík was the chief curator of the Gallery of the Capital City of Prague, and since 1991, he also collaborated with the first private exhibition institution, Gallery MXM, which for a short time became the center of cultural life in Prague.

Ševčík taught for many years at the AVU, from 1995 to 2013, when he was a member of the Department of Theory and History of Art, Prorector, and head of the Research and Development Center at AVU, which he founded in 1997. The aim of the center was to research the recent history of the history of art as Jiří Ševčík sought to fill the gaps in the study of art history in the country after 1948. One of the first outputs of the research group was the anthology Czech Art 1938-1989, followed by the anthology Czech Art 1980-2010 and the book on architecture Czech and Slovak Architecture 1971-2011.

Jiří Ševčík was a recipient of the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, and in 2018 he and his wife were awarded the Ministry of Culture Prize for their lifelong contribution to the development of Czech culture.