Ratiboř

The Stará poštá gallery in Nový Jičín has prepared an exhibition for March by an artist who is an architect by profession and an artist by soul. As he says himself, painting pictures and creating objects from wood and metal are his lifelong needs.

Libor Sost'ák, a native of Vsetín, is an academic architect and has won numerous awards, including the House of the Year award for the ICEC office building in Ostrava. At the same time, his lifelong interest is fine art. Right now he is presenting his paintings and objects in the Stará pošta Gallery. The exhibition is called "On the Road".

Libor Sost'ák: " I always wanted to be a painter. My grandfather was an amateur painter and I always went painting with him, he painted en plein air as a classical landscape painter. I was very fond of painting, I studied at the Secondary School of Arts and Crafts, but I majored in interior and architectural design. And so I was close to studying architecture, but the painting still remains with me. It's an activity that I still have a compulsion for, that makes me want to make paintings, objects out of wood and metal, it's a life need for me."

His work was also influenced by a six-month internship in Paris dedicated to modern architecture and the study of theatre architecture. Visiting galleries there, he became attached to abstract art.

Libor Sost'ák: "I started to paint on OSB boards for a while. These boards served me to start creating pictorial compositions on them, where I would paint the individual chips with different colours and create compositions that I deliberately wanted, mostly geometric or even free. And then I had the idea of transferring those structures, those artistically interesting shapes of the chips, onto the canvas and enlarging them. And here in this first room you can see the process of enlarging the chips."

The second part of the exhibition then consists of objects made from materials he gives a second chance, mostly wood and metals.

Libor Sost'ák: " These objects started when I was cleaning out my grandparents' old barn and found various agricultural tools and wooden elements that didn't make sense to me, but I took it as a souvenir of my grandparents and didn't throw it away. After a while I went back to it and started to put them together into art objects. Then my friends started bringing me different things that they found at home in the garage or left by the garbage cans. So they are kind of recycled objects."

Libor Sošťák regularly exhibits at home and abroad. His original work will be on display in Nový Jičín until 27 March 2025.

Text and video taken from the website
www.polar.cz