Zbyněk Sekal: A Private Affair

The exhibition A Private Affair at the Museum of Modern Art presents not only a cross-section of Zbyněk Sekal’s (1926–1998) work, but above all, it is an attempt to open up his inner world to the viewer as a space of memory, anxiety, order, and silence. Alongside selected sculptures, assemblages, and boxes, his own words in the form of diary excerpts and personal thoughts also enter the exhibition, creating intimate coordinates of the artist's human presence. The exhibition is made possible by a donation to the Olomouc Museum of Art collection from the estate of the artist’s wife, Christine Sekal.

Zbyněk Sekal’s artistic work is imbued with deep personal experience and existential anxiety. He was an exceptionally focused and solitary man, marked by war, imprisonment, and time in a concentration camp. He coped with the experience of extreme chaos by needing to find order in the things around him and to create a new whole from their fragments. This principle permeates his entire oeuvre — from early sculptures from the 1950s, through hanging assemblages of found objects and used materials from the 1960s, to the complex and strictly composed boxes he intensely pursued from the 1980s.

Exhibition Information

EXHIBITION: Zbyněk Sekal: A Private Affair. Insights into the Olomouc Museum of Art Collections

DATE: July 1 – October 4, 2026

LOCATION: Museum of Modern Art, Gallery

CURATORS: Olga Š. Staníková, Klára Jeništová

TRANSLATION AND LANGUAGE EDITING: Zuzana Henešová

INSTALLATION: Vlastimil Sedláček, Filip Šindelář, Radka Žáková

SOUND PRODUCTION: Kamil Zajíček, Petr Votoček

ELECTRICAL INSTALLATION: Dušan Sapara

GRAPHIC DESIGN: Kateřina Manková

EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS: Denisa Tessenyi, David Hrbek

The exhibition was made possible by a donation from the artist's wife, Christine Sekal, who in her will divided Zbyněk Sekal's artistic estate among five institutions. In addition to the Olomouc Museum of Art, these are the West Bohemian Gallery in Pilsen, Museum Kampa, the National Gallery in Prague, and the Belvedere in Vienna.

QR code with a link to the audio guide for Zbyněk Sekal's exhibition A Private Affair. Scan the QR code and return to Zbyněk Sekal's thoughts in the Cabinet of Wonders application. Here you will find more excerpts from his diaries and also have the option to ask the AI guide.

Besides his sculptural work, Sekal dedicated himself to drawing, collages, graphic design of book covers, and translations of demanding German philosophical and literary texts. At the same time, he formulated his own original texts and kept diaries, which today represent a unique key to understanding his thinking and artistic work. These diary entries become one of the important axes of this exhibition — not merely as a commentary on the work, but as its natural part. As the author's voice, which remains silent, yet urgent.

In addition to existentialism, Sekal was strongly influenced by Art Informel, and although he remained a distinct solitary figure, his work belonged to the broader circle of post-war European art, reacting to the breakdown of certainties and the search for a new language after the war. The need to withdraw from the outside world and the pressure of the contemporary regime led him to a certain form of internal emigration even before his actual departure after 1968 and subsequent settlement in Vienna. There he found his new studio, where he spent long hours in concentrated solitude, surrounded only by his works and an endless amount of material, and where, over the years, he built a protective microworld.

Sekal's work can appear quiet, sometimes even withdrawn. Yet — or precisely because of this — it has the ability to address one very personally. It does not impose an interpretation or offer unambiguous answers. Rather, it creates a space in which one can pause for a moment and enter into a concentrated silence. Perhaps it is here that his work opens up the most: as a patient reassembly of the world from fragments, as an attempt to capture what otherwise falls apart, and as a silent, yet urgent testimony to the human experience.