Jiří Sopko

* 1942

  • “I finished school... We had one classmate who I was friends with, he was a Greek Cypriot - Giorgos Kotsonis - I’m still in touch with him. I visited him there three times already. He actually convinced me to go with him to Cyprus at the time. He was returning there after six years. He had a curious history - he’d studied in Chine, he still speaks perfect Chinese. Then he travelled around Europe for about a year, he was in England, even in Moscow, before he came upon this school here - the Academy. So he applied, spent a year learning the language in Hamry. So I went to Cyprus right after finishing school. Back then I received the studio award, and Pelc, who had always treated me with the utmost decency, changed it into a travel scholarship and sorted out all the paperwork with the police or wherever, so they’d let me go. Planes didn’t go there at all back then. So I travelled via Greece, where I spent two weeks. That was the year 66, during the time when the Greek king ended his rule and the military junta came to power. From there I went by boat to Cyprus.”

  • “When I was in the army I served at the Army Art Studio here in Žižkov [Q: What was that?] The Army Art Studio was... the budget that soldiers received included an enormous sum, I don’t know how big, for art. So the staff army artists - such as Radek Kolář, Schoř, the sculptor Zdrůbecký, Čermáková... they painted those totally regime-conformed pictures. And they bought those for the army themselves. We were there as kind of flunkeys, there were about four us. So for example, we acted as security for exhibitions and things like that.”

  • “Things started slowly freeing up after a very long time. They allowed us to exhibit in these... I don’t know, in Sokolov or in those really peripheral local galleries. There was a kind of group of us - Načeradská, Lamr, and Rudla Němec. So the four of us, sometimes just two or three, exhibited in these regions. I know one time I was exhibiting my watercolours in some culture club. I can’t remember if it was in Sokolov or where. All I know was that no one came to the vernissage, much to my relief. There were only two young lady censors there, who really liked it, they were guffawing and saying they had to send schools to see this. The next day their boss came - I didn’t see her in person - and said: ‘Out with it immediately!’”

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Praha, 15.12.2015

    (audio)
    délka: 01:47:15
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Fates of Artists in Communist Czechoslovakia
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The exemplar must be surpassed

Jiří  Sopko
Jiří Sopko
zdroj: Webová stránka www.jirisopko.cz

Jiří Sopko was born on 20 February 1942 into a Czech-Slovak family in Subcarpathian Ruthenia. Shortly before the arrival of the Russian army, his family fled to Slovakia, where his father worked as a high-ranking official. After 1950 his father was forced to take up factory work, and the witness and his mother and siblings moved to Kladno. Jiří Sopko attended a secondary school of arts at Hollar in Prague, which he followed up with studies of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts. The year 1968 meant an end to any chance at exhibiting his works for a long time. He travelled to France but returned to Czechoslovakia six months later. He worked as a restorer and gradually began exhibiting again in small regional galleries. In 1987 he reacted to the new art group Tvrdohlaví (Hard-headed) by co-founding the free art association 12/15 Pozdě, ale přece (12/15 Better late than never). In late 1989, based on the requests of students, he started teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he held the office of rector from 2002 to 2010. He continues to head a painting studio there.