• born in 1942 in Prague, Czech Republic
• immigrated to Canada in 1968
• studied at Karlova University, Prague (1961-1966)

click on thumbnails at left to view larger images

Tracing his artistic roots back to central European philosophy and aesthetics, Jiri Ladocha focussed in the 1970s on painting and printmaking, showing abstract expressionist works that combined the warm rich colours of Prague with symbols such as roses, vines, circles, and repeated faces. By the 1980s he had moved on to paintings that were expanses of grayish plaster studded with gilded stars, pyramids and lines like medieval depictions of comet tails. The change was evidenced by works such as Synthesis Series (1980) and Triptych (1980). As Ladocha admitted to John Bentley Mays at the time, it was a return to the images that initially inspired him in the Czech Republic: "I grew up surrounded by the Baroque . .  . and I was fascinated by the churches, the metal leaf and plaster, and the ikons in them" (1980). The use of plaster as a paint changed into an incorporation of moulded plaster forms on the flat surfaces of his works, and this in turn grew into a fascination with the moulds themselves. Ladocha began to borrow from the Italian sculptural tradition which he encountered first-hand on a series of visits to Italy in the second half of the 1980s. Since then his work has revolved mainly around the use of broken plaster casts that capture the classical human forms of antiquity. In the 1990 show ISORO, he combined his paintings with broken plaster casts, sometimes sitting them on stone or a bed of nails, perching heads on tops of tripodal stands. Gary Michael Dault commented: "It is as if he aligned his own history and this history of his mother country and rendered those congruent histories . . . fetishistic, forced them to bend together in the plus-minus, push-pull ambiguities that come to some synthetic resting place in the work" (1990). Ladocha used similar imagery in the sculpture for the series Dreaming of a Story, the Story of a Dream (1991), using replicated Roman statuary pieces to twine his own history with that of a larger history. In 1992 he returned to Prague to show Time After Dusk at the Galerie Pecka, a show that revolved around the artist’s use of a plaster cast of Voltaire’s head in Cubist sculptural arrangements. In 1995, Ladocha began to use test tubes and syringes as sculptures in his series, The New Alchemy, and in 1996, he took part in Diaspora, a group show held in Prague in the Zipovska Synagogue as a 50th Anniversary tribute to the survivors of the Holocaust. In the synagogue Ladocha installed a wooden armoire with glass sides and back, and glass shelves containing plaster heads and wax heads, as well as three tables with drawers open to reveal small plaster heads inside. Born in Therezn during the Second World War, Ladocha also underwent a personal journey on his return to Prague for the exhibition, visiting his birth place for the first time since he had left Prague in 1968. Rick Kardonne wrote of his pieces for Diaspora, in particular the armoire with its bolted front doors,"this sculpted construction epitomized the stereotypical diasporic concept of perilous rootlessness, often masked behind veneers of illusionary security, symbolized by the bolted front doors, which in the final analysis, offer no protection at all" (1996).

Galerie Evelyne Delian, Paris, France

Arte Contemporaneo, Madrid, Spain

Ontario Now 2: A Survey of Contemporary Art
Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton, Ontario

Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario

Bau-Xi Gallery, Toronto, Ontario

Harbourfront Gallery, Toronto, Ontario

Professional Art Dealers' Association of Canada (PADAC), Toronto, Ontario

Peterborough Public Art Gallery, Peterborough, Ontario

On View
(traveling throughout Ontario)

Toronto Dominion Centre, Toronto, Ontario

Casa Loma, Toronto, Ontario

Collector's Cabinet, Toronto, Ontario

Adams and Yves Gallery, Toronto, Ontario

Athet Israel, Toronto, Ontario

International Gallery, Toronto, Ontario

National Young Artists Show
Brno, Czech Republic

Cumming, Glen E. Jiri Ladocha -- Madagascar. Hamilton, Ontario: Art Gallery of Hamilton, 1985.

---. Ontario Now 2: A Survey of Contemporary Art. Hamilton, Ontario: Art Gallery of Hamilton, 1977.

Dault, Gary Michael. "Jiri Ladocha - Interventions." Canadian Art (Winter 1989): 62-63.

---. Jiri Ladocha - ISORO. Toronto, Ontario: Evelyn Aimis Gallery, 1990.

Diaspora. Prague, Czech Republic: Libenska Synagoga na Palmovce, 1995.

Genereux, Linda.  "Linking history to modernism." Metropolis 2, no. 46 (5 April 1990): n.p.

Kardonne, Rick. "Jiri Ladocha: Return to roots." Artfocus 4, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 10-13.

Klimes, Jana. "Jiri Ladocha at Factory 77." Artmagazine (September/October 1980): 35-36.

Manisco, Lucio. Jiri Ladocha. New York, New York: Factory 77, 1980.

Mays, John Bentley. "Ladocha abandons Ab-Ex for chaste plaster and gilt." Toronto Globe and Mail, 24 April 1980, n.p.

Pánková, Marcela. Jiri Ladocha: Dreaming of a Story, the Story of a Dream. Prague, Czech Republic: Vladimír Tuma, 1991.

Sculpture/Toronto: An Illustrated Guide to Toronto's Historic and Contemporary Sculpture with Area Maps. Toronto, Ontario: Leidra Books, 1994.

Tiley, Jim. "Jiri Ladocha at Factory 77 and Christian Kiopini at Ydessa Gallery." Artists Review 3, no. 7 (May 1980): n.p.