Artwork of month
Bohumír Matal Cyclists, 1958

Bohumír Matal
Cyclists, 1958

oil, canvas
70 x 85 cm

in exposition 
From the collections
Masaryk Square No. 24
Jihlava

An important representative of Brno's post-war painting of the 20th century, Bohumír Matal was born on January 13, 1922 in Brno, where he also graduated from the School of Arts and Crafts. After 1968 he left Brno for the countryside, to Prudké u Doubravníku, where he bought an old derelict mill, which he gradually repaired and rebuilt into an art studio. He also died here after a long illness on July 7, 1988.

September 2021

In the years 1952-1959, he created a series of paintings with the theme of cyclists, as perfect movement studies, capturing sports-developed bodies of racers, where you can gradually observe the process of transforming real forms into a geometrizing structure of colored surfaces. One of the late works of this cycle is also the Jihlava painting, in which real figures almost disappear and the play of colors and oval and triangular shapes prevails.