Miroslav Šnajdr Sr. was born on November 8, 1938, in Toveř near Olomouc. He studied at the State Conservatory in Brno, majoring in French horn. Under the influence of his father, František Šnajdr, he devoted himself to visual arts from childhood. It is hard to say whether he is more of a musician or a visual artist. He experienced his first encounter with Klimt already as a child when he came across a reproduction of the painting Hope in his father’s library.

Klimt’s landscapes inspired Šnajdr mainly by the way the artist worked with color. In Šnajdr’s imagination, as both a painter and a musician, these landscapes also connect with the work of the composer Gustav Mahler.

Jiří Jůza

“In my later mature years, some of my own works seemed to resonate with Klimt’s art. One of them was a dominant painting from the 1980s. It was called Window to Happiness and I painted it in 1988, at the age of fifty. It was a painting about distant happiness, carrying the tension of meditation and sadness, as well as confident painting.”

Miroslav Šnajdr

Translated with the help of GPT chat.

Curator: Jiří Jůza