Czech draughtsman and visual artist, born on 4 November 1961 in Česká Lípa. He lives and works in Prague.
Life
The only son of two Czechoslovak railway employees, Luboš Plný drew from childhood and developed a passion for anatomy, to the point of dissecting dead animals. He trained as an electrician. After his military service, in 1983, he suffered from depression, sleep disorders and hallucinations; he was diagnosed with simple schizophrenia and hospitalised.
Having moved to Prague in 1989, he twice failed the entrance examination for the Academy of Fine Arts. That same year he began to pose there as a model, an activity he pursued for six years as an artistic project. In 2000 the rector, Jiří T. Kotalík, conferred on him the title, invented by Plný himself, of “academic model”; since then he has signed his works with a stamp bearing this title. “I realised I would rather be the best model than a mediocre artist,” he has said. He has also worked as a painter of toy soldiers, a second-hand bookseller and a gallery attendant, and in 2004 trained as a gravedigger.
The work
Plný explores the human body, and first of all his own, through horizontal, vertical or lateral sections close to tomography, in coloured ink, acrylic and collage. His sources range from nineteenth-century anatomical treatises to X-rays and the waxes of La Specola in Florence. He incorporates organic matter: blood, hair, his parents’ ashes. Each drawing records his age in days at the start and end of the work; a diary logs his activities, his health, the weather and astronomical phenomena.
The gallery presents, among other works, a Sans titre of 2008 (Indian ink and acrylic on paper, 83 x 60 cm).
Exhibitions and collections
- “Body Electric”, Cavin-Morris Gallery, New York, 2007
- “Anatomia Metamorphosis” (with Anna Zemánková), Montreuil, Istanbul, Prague, Berlin and Hiroshima, 2009-2012
- “Viva Arte Viva”, 57th Venice Biennale, 2017; “Viva Luboš Plný!”, DOX, Prague, 2017-2018
- abcd collection / Bruno Decharme; Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou; regional museum of Česká Lípa