For almost 25 years, Zdeněk Sýkora has been programming his pictures with the help of a computer. But the art of the Czechoslovakia, born in Louny in 1920, must not be mistaken for the current, easily digestible computer graphic.

It is by all means a “difficult” art which this painter presents us with. Sýkora feeds the computer according to a selfinvented system based on strict mathematical chance and then transforms the answers made up of numbers as lines into the picture.

In Germany, attention was drawn to Sýkora early (1969 at the constructivist Biennial in Nuremburg and a year before at documenta 4 in Kassel). But the particular circumstances following the consequences of the “Prague Spring” isolated the painter for a long time in his home country and cut him off from the outside world as well.

At the Gallery Teufel, Sýkora is being introduced in a oneman exhibition for the first time in Cologne. Teufel is primarily showing the production from the years 1980 to 1986. In this period the transformation in the work is striking. At first glance, one might think that a constructivist artist has been converted to unbridled, spontaneous painting.

But the appearance of “wildness” is deceiving! For the apparent disorder with Sýkora follows precise laws of numbers. At Teufel´s, linearly structured paintings can be seen which not only look as if they are sections from a larger pictorial complex, but are indeed precisely such sections. For there where the lines of the most varied thickness, colors and curvature leave the picture plane are their existence really not at an end, according to the computer´s solution proposal. It is the artist himself who set their limit through the borders of the picture.