Karel Nepras #1 Multi-cache

[EN] Summary
Karel Nepras, a legend of modern Czech sculpture and grafic art, was born in Prague April 2nd 1932. Nepras's sculptures are made of industrial materials held together in most peculiar ways. He created them using all kinds of wires, hoses, scraps of metal and water pipes he often moulded himself. He painted most of his works red. The Communists hated both Nepras and his work, mainly because of his use of the red colour and the fact that his sculptures obliquely poked fun at the Communist regime.
In the years 1952-57 Nepras studied at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts. In the mid 1960s, at the U krizovniku pub in Prague, he and some of his colleagues founded what they called the Crusaders' School of Pure Humour Without Jokes. Their group became known as 'the pub academy' of Czech bohemians and won fame thanks to numerous practical jokes and pranks. 1969 was an important year for Karel Nepras, as it was then that he first discovered cast iron, a material that he was to use in his art till the end of his life. In Ostrava in the late 1960s he created a monumental work called Family Ready to Depart but it was pulled down on the order of the Communist authorities. Due to his tense relations with them, he was barred from exhibiting between 1974 and 1988. He nearly gave up making sculptures and devoted himself to conservation work. In the late 1980s, Nepras created one of his greatest works, a fountain called Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs which was composed of drainage lids, industrial ceramics and fixtures for an art fair in Basel, Switzerland. 
Karel Nepras was an nonconformist and peculiar artist who has been active in Czech sculpture and related fields for quite a number of years. He is considered the inventor of Czech grotesque art, and his work is steeped in symbolism and black humor. 
After the fall of Communism, Karel Nepras was appointed in 1990 professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. In his role as teacher and head of the sculpture studio at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague, he passed on his experience to the younger generation. His sculptures gained him recognition in many countries and can be found in collections in Paris, Washington and in Germany.
The last work he began before he died was the equestrian statue of Jaroslav Hasek (half-horse, half-pubdesk, with a bust). Nepras was thrilled with an idea of equestrian monument to the great humorist and offered him actually the last decade of his life. Before the final completion of the monument, however, he unexpectedly died. His daughter Carolina has ended and realized the whole work in 2005. The memorial is situated in Zizkov - part of Prague where Jaroslav Hasek lived during the period of writing his world-famous novel The Good Soldier Svejk, an unfinished collection of farcical incidents about a soldier in World War I, which has been translated into sixty languages over the world.
Karel Nepras died at April 5th 2002 of a stroke in a Prague hospital. It seems like a trick of fate that a man who had always mocked absurd things died just three days after his 70th birthday, at a time, when a retrospective exhibition of his life-long work was being prepared.
(modified article in Radio Praha and extended)