Interview: Robert Bucek
Luca Curci talks with Robert Bucek, one of the winners of the ARTIST OF THE MONTH – JUNE 2020.

“A Story” in the broad sense of the word is the point in my work. The story may be experienced, seen, literary or mythical. Sometimes there is a feeling of a given situation and that evokes another, inner feelings consequently. Through the materialization of those feelings I contemplate their contents and identify with them. Most of my work is based on an impulse from a given place – creating a work directly or based on inspiration from a specific place. Sometimes, the process of obtaining material for installation is so central for my work that its form and course became one of its parts.

Luca Curci – What is art for you? 
Robert Bucek – I heard an interview with a very old and very good painter. She talked about drawing and said, “Even if it’s just one line, if it’s true, everything is fine”; I think you can say that with art in general. The word art has such a wide meaning today. However, in my opinion, the inner principles have not changed since Michelangelo’s time.

LC – What’s your background? What is the experience that has influenced your work the most?
RB – It’s a story. A story in the broad sense of the word. It can be a lived, seen or told story, a literary or mythical story. Sometimes it can be just a feeling of the situation that evokes inner stories. By materializing these stories, I identify with them or take a certain attitude towards them.The works of recent years are stories that are evoked in a person by experience from a specific place. Although it is a landscape, we can strongly feel the presence of man and his need to find his own place in this landscape and become part of it.

LC – Are your artworks focused on a specific theme? 
RB – I usually work in such a way that the individual works unfold from each other – I don’t have a topic I’m working on, that I would finish the sculpture and start something new. My work is more continuous. It’s like a chain where working on one statue generates resources for another. Perhaps rather than as a chain, I perceive my work as a concentric circle. Every sculpture, every theme, every new experience will create a circle with a larger radius. It’s expanding. Mostly I can’t say what I’m working on. It is the overall process from which a finished sculpture is created from time to time.

LC – How is being an artist nowadays?
RB – Probably like in any other time in the last thousand years. I hope that there will always be a place for people who, with their creative work, imagination and imaginativeness, respond to the questions of our time – social, political, sociological, ecological, etc., and then there must be a place for people who may not be interested in any of those questions and all they need to do is to draw – and from a certain point of view, they have a right to do it. I think I rather belong to this group.

LC – Do visitors’ suggestions enrich yourself and your art?
RB – It’s definitely very rewarding. In a meeting, conversation, new perspective, etc., it doesn’t affect my work too much. Sculpture is a very lengthy process and I have been working on some topics for several years. I have to be sure of what I’m doing myself.

LC – Did your style change over the years? In which way? 
RB – Very much – at the beginning of my work, I often worked with a human figure and a particular story. I studied figurative sculpture. Today I am interested in less specific and less defined topics. And my work is not so straightforward also.