The painter Ladislav Placatka and the composer Jan Bedřich also took part and a joint composition Eine kleine Dadamusik (with the phrases Duchaminulost, Duchapřítomnost, Duchabudoucnost) was performed.
[18] After this event some left the "Club" and the remaining members - Karel Nepraš, Jan Koblasa, Bedřich Dlouhý and Rudolf Komorous continued to meet as Šmidra group[note 2] (Jaroslav Vožniak joined in 1955).
[13] In 1957 they prepared a one-day exhibition on Střelecký ostrov together with invited literary artists (Václav Havel, Jiří Paukert, Milena Tobolová) and professional musicians (Modern Jazz Quintet of Eugen Jegorov, Rudolf Dašek, Milan Kostohryz, etc. )
[13] Their joint performance was also a distinctive 1959 production of Arsonist's daughter by Josef Kajetán Tyl and a parody of the official rituals of the time - The Ceremonial Academy of the Šmidra group in memory of the poet Václav Svoboda Plumlovský at the Reduta Jazz Club in 1960 (with the participation of Hana Purkrábková, Aleš Veselý, Kateřina Černá, Čestmír Janošek, Jan Klusák, Petr Lampl, Bohumír Mráz).
[13] In addition to artists (Naděžda Plíšková, Zbyšek Sion, Otakar Slavík, Zdeněk Beran, Rudolf Němec, Aleš Lamr, Olaf Hanel, Antonín Tomalík, etc. )
[30] The free association of the Crusader School was a completely unique creative phenomenon, which, as a distinctive parallel to the Fluxus movement, connected everyday reality with art, with the ambition to enter the social or natural environment.
[35] Musical activities of the Midsummer Night's Dream Band (founder Karel Nepraš (violin), Miloslav Hájek, Milan Čech, Petr Lampl, Vratislav Brabenec)[36] and The Plastic People of the Universe, happenings, trips from Prague to the sources of the Vltava River or climbing Říp, wake-up calls to Blaník knights, "collecting beer samples", ephemeral joint projects (staging The Bartered Bride in the U Svitáků pub)[37] were part of collective mental regeneration, but were not directly related to the artistic activities of the members.
Strict criteria were applied for the admission of new members - in particular, to demonstrate the ability to be creatively oneself and to be able to respect the never established rules of the game, which could only be derived from a specific situation.
[42] Before the beginning of normalization, he lost the possibility to publish cartoon humour in Dikobraz magazine and other periodicals, and in the following years he devoted himself to free drawing and graphic art.
From the mid-1960s onwards, Karel Nepraš gradually established himself as a draughtsman and sculptor, participating in important exhibitions at home and abroad, and his work was of interest to galleries and art collectors.
[62] He has been represented in hundreds of group exhibitions at home and abroad (Germany, France, USA, Netherlands, Belgium, UK, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Poland, Spain, Indonesia).
[64][13] Eventually, they abandoned the lyrical primitivizing poetics towards abstraction and evolved into a peculiar, often very harsh and black cartoon humour, with which he reacted to the political oppression of the time.
[66] The drawings of human figures from the late 1950s reflect an absurd, dehumanised and alienated world where horror and terror as well as comedy and humour grow from the same base (Funeral of a Clown, 1957).
Some were inspired by reading - illustrations for The Trial by Franz Kafka (1959) or the poems of Edgar Allan Poe ('Berenice, 1960), music (The Midnight Tone, 1959) or social atmosphere (Puppet Theatre, Labyrinths of the World, 1956–1961), and gradually evolved into a specific kind of black humour with existential overtones (Little Brutality, 1959).
[13] The concept of strangeness manifested itself as a polymorphous assemblage technique in painting, sculpture and music, and the absurdities of the historical realities of Czechoslovak totalitarian regime gave it ever new impulses.
[68] After a short non-figurative period (1960), Nepraš's subsequent drawings were created in parallel with his sculptural work and preceded the expressive figures and heads with bare bodily structures.
[69] The drawings reflected absurd plots and gradually reached a greater complexity of meaning (variants of Dialogues, Everything is in a Ball, the catalogue Cycle of Human Misfortunes, 1960s–1980s),[11] while maintaining an ironic outlook and unkind humour.
In it, Kosík develops the metaphor of modern society as an absurd Great Mechanism in which man finds himself helpless in a network of bureaucratic machinery and in a perpetuated alienated reality.
In 1971, at the ceramic symposium in Hradec Králové, Karel Nepraš created a large assemblage of majolica elements, The Great Fountain (South Bohemian Gallery in Hluboká collection).
Nepraš chose this technology, working with the element of random accretion of mass, to speed up the structuring of the surface,[5] but removed the protrusions that did not correspond to his idea before finishing (Galvanized Sculpture, 1961).
[75] The sculptures were created using a very laborious technique as assemblages of wires, tubes and found metal objects joined with textiles or women's stockings and fixed with epoxy, usually colored with red lacquer to enhance the plasticity.
In Nepraš's attractive horror conception, his three versions of Moroa (1965–1967) are skinless anatomical monsters, assembled from wires covered with fabric and painted with white, pink or red lacquer.
[43] In 1972, he created the sculptural installation The Assault on the Rabbit Hutch as an undisguisedly stark monument to the times, thematizing the dysfunction, horror and irony of the situation, with mechanized dehumanized busts of a manipulated man.
[85] At the same time, he assembles individual sculptures into new contexts of meaning (variants of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1988–1991), or creates conceptual environments (The Lament Wall, 1990, Bath for MV).
In 1990, he participated in the International Sculpture Symposium at Lemberk Castle and created a spatial installation made of pipes and cast iron tubes resembling a giant animal skeleton.
He learned to work with electroporcelain, which he used in smaller relief sculptures (Drying Landscape, 1995, Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs IV, 1995, Manifestation at Temelín, 1995–1996, Thurn-Taxis Ditch, 1995).
He was blessed with an extraordinary dose of black humour and as a seemingly non-participant or cruel observer he drew attention to small and large tragedies of human fates.
The first commission in collaboration with architect Pavel Kupka was a relief with stylized aluminum heads in the entrance to the Office Machines building in Prague on Můstek (1969–1971).
[93][94][95] Karel Nepraš also used cast iron elements and steel in larger objects for public space (Cameraman, 1988, Bower and Springhouse, 1989, Home for the elderly in Malešice).
[97] In front of the Tuscany Palace at Hradčany Nepraš's stone columns are made in Baroque proportions of stylized busts of ladies wearing a neckcloth, thus forming the counterpart of the male guards of Prague Castle.