Zdeněk Sýkora
Zdeněk Sýkora (3 February 1920 – 12 July 2011) was a Czech modern abstract painter and sculptor who helped pioneer the use of computers in art. He was born in Louny, Czechoslovakia. In the late 1940s he painted landscapes, but in the 1950s he moved toward geometrical abstract structures. The 1960s brought influences from cubism and surrealism, and he became one of the first artists to use computers to create geometric abstract paintings. Because of Soviet control after World War II, many exhibitions were restricted, and some late-1960s works were shown mainly as government building projects. He spent a lot of time working in Prague during these years.
His style later loosened into line paintings, with bands of color running across large canvases in random directions. In the 1960s he joined the art group Křižovatka (The Crossroad) and created early structures for architecture in Prague’s Letná district on Jindřišská Street. In 1985 he began collaborating on paintings with his wife Lenka Sýkora. One architectural project is the flight operations building in Jeneč near Prague.
Sýkora had his second retrospective in 1995, twenty-five years after his first in 1970 at Špála Gallery (the first was not allowed by the occupying authorities). The Prague City Gallery organized a retrospective in the Municipal Library. He remained active almost until his death in Louny in 2011, aged 91. His work is owned by galleries worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and MUMOK in Vienna, and he had hundreds of exhibitions. A partial list is available on Prague Art & Design.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 00:00 (CET).