Radoslav Kratina 2 December — 10 September was a Czech graphic and industrial designer, photographer, painter, curator and sculptor. His work, based on rational thinking and a materialistic conception of the world, [ 1 ] is rarely unified and focused. After the Soviet occupation in and during the following normalization , he lost the opportunity to exhibit and his works, created in isolation, were only discovered after the fall of the communist regime in The variability of his artefacts is consistent with the concept of open work as formulated by Umberto Eco in the s.
Radoslav Kratina was born on 2 December in Brno. He studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Brno from to and after graduation worked as a textile designer. After moving to a new apartment in , he began to work as freelancer. In he assembled his first variable object from matchsticks. The following year he participated in the exhibitions New Sensibility. Crossroads and Guests in Prague and Brno , and between and in a series of exhibitions of the Club of Concretists at home and abroad.
Kratina acted as secretary and organizer of all the club's activities throughout this time. After the occupation in , some members of the Club of Concretists emigrated and the club ceased its activities in Kratina lost the opportunity to exhibit and until he privately and in isolation developed the possibilities of his transformable objects and wrote accompanying texts in which he tried to interpret his own work as accurately as possible.
At the end of normalization in September , before the restoration of the Club of Concretists , [ 12 ] he founded the Creative group Geometry. Kratina was represented at all major exhibitions covering modern Czech art since the early s and at a number of solo exhibitions in regional galleries and in Prague. Retrospective exhibitions surveying his work in detail were held posthumously in Liberec and in at the Prague City Gallery Stone Bell House.
Soon after its foundation, the club grew to 36 permanent members. After the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia , some emigrated and the rest were not allowed to exhibit. The club disbanded after After graduating from the School of Arts and Crafts in Brno, Radek Kratina devoted himself to textile design in — Here he applied his innate sense of order and harmony in the design of decorative cloth and indigo prints based on the principle of regular geometric patterns.
