The main character of this book, Vashti, thinks she can't draw. Encouraged by her teacher to leave any mark of her own on the blank paper, Vashti makes a dot. And so begins the story of creativity being within each of us. You just need to believe in your own abilities. Hence International Dot Day, which celebrates creativity and aims to encourage young and old to use their imaginations and not be afraid to let their imaginations run wild. This holiday even has its own website, which offers a range of accompanying activities and ways to get involved in the day.

For this holiday, we have selected from our collections a visually thematic work by Karel Malich entitled I saw it from 1993. This year (October 18) it will be 100 years since the birth of this important Czech sculptor, painter, graphic artist and pedagogue, whose works are part of collections all over the world (for example, the Slovak National Gallery, Center Georges Pompidou, Paris or the McCrory Collection, New York). Malich came from Holice near Pardubice, and the local landscape was a great inspiration for his work. He first studied art education and aesthetics at the Pedagogical Faculty of Charles University (1945–49) and then graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague under Vladimír Silovský (1950–53). During his lifetime, he was a member and co-founder of a number of artistic groups (e.g. SČUG Hollar, Proměna Group, Křižovatka). At the beginning of his professional career, in the early 1950s, he was inspired by post-impressionism, and a number of landscape paintings were created in this spirit. The 1960s are already marked by a shift towards abstraction – he creates collages, reliefs, and later also spatial sculptures. From those, in the 1970s, he moved on to wire objects. In the years 1979-85, the sculpture Landscape with the Eternal is created, which is often considered the pivotal work of his career, and in which he once again returns to his native Holice, specifically the Kamenecký hill, the motif of which appears in Malich's work, even if perhaps in a reduced form of geometric shapes and lines, repeatedly. From the second half of the 1980s, Malich concentrated more on drawings and colored pastels.

Jana Jarošová, September 15, 2024