Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1928 Pilsen, Czechoslovakia (now Plzeň, Czech Republic)

Died: 2020 London, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1966

Biography

Sculptor Irena Sedlecká was born on 7 September 1928 in Plzeň, Czechoslovakia. Following the German occupation, which began with the annexation of Sudetenland in 1938 (and by the end of 1944 had extended to all parts of the former Czechoslovakia), her state education was abruptly terminated and Irena and her younger sister, Jaroslava, were home-schooled by their mother. Her hopes of becoming a teacher were dashed when (apparently owing to her father's black, curly hair) she failed a test of 'Aryan purity' and she was sent instead to work in a wire factory, finding solace in drawing and creating ceramics. After the war, she trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, under Karel Pokorny and V. V. Stech, Sedlecká graduated in 1949 with the State Prize for Excellence. The Communist takeover in 1948 provided plentiful public commissions for sculptors, prestigious commissions for monumental sculpture were forthcoming and a brilliant career beckoned. In 1952, the year in which she married sculptor Ludwig Kodym, Sedlecká was awarded the Lenin Prize for sculpture. 14 years later, in 1966, however, she chose to flee the Communist regime, having become 'very disappointed with....socialist realism', travelling first to Yugoslavia with her second husband, Stefan Drexler and her children, on the pretence of a camping holiday, flitting across the border into Italy, then to France, and finally, to Britain. Although she hoped to return to Czechoslovakia in 1968, she was deterred by the USSR's brutal repression of the uprising known as the 'Prague Spring'.

Arriving in England, unable to speak English and with only one small example of her work, she described the years 1967–74 as 'wasted': she made little new sculpture, although the practical training she had received in Prague enabled her to earn a modest living doing occasional sculptural modelling jobs for the British Museum and others. Her first studio was in Kentish Town, north London. Later she moved to a disused chicken shed on a rundown industrial estate in Bushey, Hertfordshire, a long commute from her home in south Wandsworth. After meeting and marrying her third husband, fellow Czech émigré sculptor, Franta Bělský (whom she had met in Prague), he helped her to secure exhibiting opportunities. Both artists became deeply involved with the Society of Portrait Sculptors (founded in 1953 by immigrant artists including Jacob Epstein and Dora Gordine), and played a key role in its revitalisation after a period of virtual hibernation. She first exhibited with the Society of Portrait Sculptors in 1967, but her big breakthrough was not until 1978, the result of the success of the commission for the Head of Sir Laurence Olivier. This led indirectly to the making of a series of 'Talking Heads', the brainchild of former theatrical producer, John Wimbourne, who intended them as marketing tools. Sedlecká first modelled a life-size portrait in clay, using photographs of her celebrity sitters taken from many angles, from which casts were taken in plaster. After she had checked the contours, a second plaster cast was made from which the sitter's facial features had been smoothed away 'like an ancient statue eroded by rain'. A film of the sitter talking through a prepared script would then be projected onto the sculpted face, animating it to an uncanny degree. A commission for an over-life size bronze figure of Freddie Mercury for Montreux followed; an enlarged fibre-glass replica of which ornamented the canopy of the Dominion Theatre at the south end of Tottenham Court Road for twelve years. The Mercury statue had been intended for London, but was rejected amid fears during the Aids crisis and concerns that it would be vandalised. In Montreux, it has become a shrine, adorned with flowers by fans of the band. In August 1992 Sedlecká's work was shown at the Czech Embassy in London as part of an exhibition devoted to the work of five distinguished Czech émigré sculptors.

Sedlecká was considered by Peter Cannon-Brookes, author of Czech Sculpture 1800–1938 (1986), to be among the most distinguished Czechoslovak-born figurative sculptors working in Britain, best known for her series of theatrical portraits of Great Actors and Singers including Sir John Gielgud (as Hamlet), Kenneth Williams, James Berwick, Nigel Hawthorn, Donald Sinden (as Othello) and Maria Callas. Other commissioned portrait heads include Ted Moult, Bobby Charlton and Sir Frank Whittle. She also sculpted many monumental portraits and busts, including Beau Brummell in Piccadilly, London. In more recent years Sedlecká acquired her most important patron, the eccentric publisher Felix Dennis for whom she has executed an over-life-size seated figure of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with his most famous creation Sherlock Holmes. Her second over-life-size bronze for Dennis represents American poet Emily Dickinson. Irena Sedlecká lived in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire until 2016, before relocating to a care home near London, where she died of complications from dementia on 4th August 2020. Her work is represented in UK collections including The British Academy and Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum. Many examples of her work were included in an exhibition at Ben Uri Gallery and Museum in 2019 entitled, Czech Routes to Britain, celebrating the contribution of Czech émigrés to British visual culture since 1900.

Related books

Nicola Baird (ed.), Czech Routes: Selected Czechoslovak Artists in Britain from the Ben Uri and Private Collections (London: Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, 2019)
Aleksandra Mir, Irena Sedlecka, Freddie on the Plinth: A Proposal (London: Didcot, 2011)
Claire Bullus and Ronald Asprey, The Statues of London (London: Merrell, 2009)
David Buckman, Artists in Britain since 1945 (London: Sansom and Co, 2006)
Bernard Dolman (ed.), Who's Who in Art (London: Art Trade Press Limited, 1994)

Public collections

Related organisations

Academy of Fine Arts, Prague (student)
Society of Portrait Sculptors (member)

Selected exhibitions

Czech Routes: Selected Czechoslovak Artists in Britain from the Ben Uri and Private Collections, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (2019)
Czech and Slovak Sculptors in Great Britain, Czechoslovak Embassy, London (1992)
Society of Portrait Sculptors, London (1974–1996)
Society of Portrait Sculptors, London (1967)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Irena Sedlecká]