Milan Grygar
Linear Score
Artist
Milan Grygar
(1926, Zvolen), Czech
Original Title
Linear Score
Date1973
Mediumcoloured inks on cardboard
Dimensions88 × 62,5 cm
Classificationsdrawings
Credit LineKunsthalle Praha
DescriptionMilan Grygar is a prominent and unique Czech artist whose contribution to art history came in the form of experiments with so-called acoustic drawings integrating sound, image, and space. His work from the 1960s and 1970s can be understood as being in dialogue with the international context, particularly the contemporary work of John Cage. Drawing has played an important part in Grygar’s art since 1964, when he began using it to explore the mutual relations between the visual component and its acoustic accompaniment, which he sees as an essential part of the creative process. He was particularly interested in this mutual relation and in the processuality of creating art. In 1965, he created his first acoustic drawings using pieces of wood and other small items, treating their visual records as autonomous signs without links to material reality. In these pieces, the acoustic event becomes more important than color, and Grygar recorded parallel sounds onto a tape recorder. The following year, he substituted hand drawing with mechanically moving objects, thus suppressing his own subjective projection within the work. Acoustic drawings exist in their final, physical forms, but they also functioned as a form of small-scale happenings. Subsequent conceptual drawings and series, created from 1967 onward, were based on the primacy of a visual graphic record which can function as a manual or an “artistic instruction” for the transcription of sound (as in the case of sheet music). Later, in his live haptic paintings (1969), Grygar produced drawings using the movement of his own body, engendering a symbiosis of sound, movement, and drawing. In the early 1980s, his interest in the topic of controlled chance led him to performance art, with the drawn record resulting from the movement of toys with lit matches attached to them. In 1987, he returned to painting through white and black canvases, approaching color as an element equivalent to sound. Grygar’s later paintings employ a reduced, minimalist morphology and are based on the principle of a synesthetic engagement between two complementary canvases (so-called Antiphons).
Linear Sheet Music (1973) is based on a fine geometric grid in which each line is conceived as a “path in time” or a carrier of sound. The regular structure is interrupted by a distortionary shift in the left-hand side of the drawing as well as by the element of four red vertical lines which carry new visual and potentially sonic qualities. Grygar began creating Linear Sheet Music drawings in the early 1970s, viewing them as “drawings with the spatial imagination of sound, which is contained in the movement of lines”.
Milan Grygar (*1926, Zvolen) was born in the Slovakian town of Zvolen but spent his childhood in Olomouc, Czech Republic. He subsequently began studying at an applied arts school in Brno (1942–1943) which was based on the principles of the Bauhaus School. Alongside the influence of his culturally oriented father, another momentous impulse for Grygar’s art came in 1935, when he first encountered the work of Lászlo Moholy-Nagy at the House of Arts in Brno. This brief yet intensive period of becoming acquainted with modern art was interrupted during the end of World War II, when Grygar was forced to work in a factory producing aircraft motors in Líšeň u Brna. He went on to study at the Academy of Art, Architecture, and Design in Prague from 1945 to 1950, in the studios of monumental painting, under Josef Novák (1945–1948) and Emil Filla 1948–1950). After graduating, he made a living designing books and movie posters. The first solo exhibition of his paintings took place in the Nová Síň gallery in Prague in 1959. Influenced by the 1964 Venice Biennale, centered on the work of American pop artists, Grygar concluded that painting was exhausted and instead turned to drawing, which eventually led him to explore the mutual interrelation between image and sound. He has had retrospective exhibitions at institutions such as the Prague City Gallery (Milan Grygar: Visual and Acoustic, 2014–2015), the ZKM in Karlsruhe (Sound on Paper, 2016), and the National Gallery Prague (Milan Grygar: 2019). In 1999, Grygar’s work was included in the exhibition Action, Word, Movement, Space at the Prague City Gallery, which presented experimental art forms of the 1960s. His work also featured in the exhibitions Membra Disjecta for John Cage at the MUMOK in Vienna (reprised at DOX: Center for Contemporary Art in Prague and the House of Arts in Ostrava) and Facing the Future: Art in Europe 1945–68 (BOZAR – Palais des Beaux-Art, Brussels). The international relevancy of his work was further spotlighted by the exhibition John Cage, Francois Morellet, Milan Grygar: Open Form (Prague City Gallery, Stone Bell House, Prague, 1993). Grygar’s art is held in numerous institutional collections in the Czech Republic as well as in international institutions such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Gent, the Muzeum Narodowe in Warsaw, the National Museum of Art in Osaka, the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Linear Sheet Music (1973) is based on a fine geometric grid in which each line is conceived as a “path in time” or a carrier of sound. The regular structure is interrupted by a distortionary shift in the left-hand side of the drawing as well as by the element of four red vertical lines which carry new visual and potentially sonic qualities. Grygar began creating Linear Sheet Music drawings in the early 1970s, viewing them as “drawings with the spatial imagination of sound, which is contained in the movement of lines”.
Milan Grygar (*1926, Zvolen) was born in the Slovakian town of Zvolen but spent his childhood in Olomouc, Czech Republic. He subsequently began studying at an applied arts school in Brno (1942–1943) which was based on the principles of the Bauhaus School. Alongside the influence of his culturally oriented father, another momentous impulse for Grygar’s art came in 1935, when he first encountered the work of Lászlo Moholy-Nagy at the House of Arts in Brno. This brief yet intensive period of becoming acquainted with modern art was interrupted during the end of World War II, when Grygar was forced to work in a factory producing aircraft motors in Líšeň u Brna. He went on to study at the Academy of Art, Architecture, and Design in Prague from 1945 to 1950, in the studios of monumental painting, under Josef Novák (1945–1948) and Emil Filla 1948–1950). After graduating, he made a living designing books and movie posters. The first solo exhibition of his paintings took place in the Nová Síň gallery in Prague in 1959. Influenced by the 1964 Venice Biennale, centered on the work of American pop artists, Grygar concluded that painting was exhausted and instead turned to drawing, which eventually led him to explore the mutual interrelation between image and sound. He has had retrospective exhibitions at institutions such as the Prague City Gallery (Milan Grygar: Visual and Acoustic, 2014–2015), the ZKM in Karlsruhe (Sound on Paper, 2016), and the National Gallery Prague (Milan Grygar: 2019). In 1999, Grygar’s work was included in the exhibition Action, Word, Movement, Space at the Prague City Gallery, which presented experimental art forms of the 1960s. His work also featured in the exhibitions Membra Disjecta for John Cage at the MUMOK in Vienna (reprised at DOX: Center for Contemporary Art in Prague and the House of Arts in Ostrava) and Facing the Future: Art in Europe 1945–68 (BOZAR – Palais des Beaux-Art, Brussels). The international relevancy of his work was further spotlighted by the exhibition John Cage, Francois Morellet, Milan Grygar: Open Form (Prague City Gallery, Stone Bell House, Prague, 1993). Grygar’s art is held in numerous institutional collections in the Czech Republic as well as in international institutions such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Gent, the Muzeum Narodowe in Warsaw, the National Museum of Art in Osaka, the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
