Experimental art forms of the second half of the 1960s and 70s have enabled Milan Grygar (born in 1926) to gain an exceptional position on the Czech as well as the international art scene. Thanks to his discovery of the so-called acoustic drawings and other related forms his work is often connected with that of John Cage.
A simplified description could present the artist first of all as a devoted painter whose patient re-examination of the principles of his work turned him into a sound artist and a life-long explorer. The present retrospective view shows us the development of Grygar´s work which started in the 1940s and underwent many changes until today, ranging from paintings influenced by Modernism, to experimental drawings connected with sound or to performances and graphical music and back to painting and further exploration of the principles of painting and properties of colours.
Milan Grygar is known for his cycles which responded best to his exploratory approach. Individual cycles either overlap or they often link up with the starting points of preceeding formal processes or, on the contrary, they show a radical turn from the existing work.
From the early 1950s, after he graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague where he studied in the studio of J. Novák and E. Filla, his paintings show the way he dealt with the heritage of modernist painting. His paintings became more and more abstract until he arrived at a monochrome black canvas. His search for a new art form made him abandon painting in the first half of the 1960s. In 1965 he made his first Acoustic drawings which represent a unique interconnection between drawings and their sound recordings. The sound and its ability to express space and time became the principal linchpins of his following experiments.
Grygar´s experiments with mechanical clock-work toys brought into his work elements of controlled coincidence, humour and playfulness. Sound and film recordings brought him nearer to performance art and his performances took place inside his studio or in recording studios.
The world of contemporary classical music, where in the mid-1960s traditional scores were replaced by new expressive graphical scores, played a significant role in Milan Grygar´s work. Under the influence of professional contemporary musicians Grygar´s work gained the form of graphical scores which were open to interpretation.
In the 1980s, after an almost twenty-year-long break, Grygar returned to painting and with his typical enthusiasm started to examine the optical properites of colours. In his precise minimalist paintings the element of sound is replaced by colour (light) and sound remains present only implicitly. The element of sound did not disappear from his most recent works – the so-called Antiphones, which are large-scale coloured diptychs evoking perception similar to synestesia. The painings count on the colour tones and explore their ability to latently „resound“ the space.
It is important to realize that chronological division of Grygar´s work into individual series of paintings or drawings is just a means for interpretation and creating the narrative of the complex work. The chronological order of the individual formal periods is in many places misleading – mainly in the 1970s and 80s some works overlapped and could not be easily included into individual cycles and for this reason proper attention was not usually paid to them.
Some art forms (minimalism, collages) are also present in Grygar´s graphical work, which played an important role in his life in the 1960s and 70s because it was a source of income, and nowadays his graphic work is regarded a significant part of the history of Czechoslovak poster and book design.
Milan Grygar is usually rather reserved when talking about his work and that is why this documentary, which also shows for the first time a few pictures from his private life, is a valuable source of information and above all a rare portrait of the artist´s personality.
Eva Riebová
