Jaroslav Krepčík

Life and work

He was born in Telč in 1880, the second of ten children of the municipal tax collector Josef Krepčík; the Czech Wikipedia gives the date as 26 February, the Telč town materials as 26 March. From 1890 to 1894 he attended the Telč secondary school, in 1894 he entered the school of sculpture and stonemasonry in Hořice, and from 1900 to 1904 he studied at the Prague Academy under Myslbek. He was a friend of Jan Štursa and Ladislav Jan Kofránek. He took part in executing the statue of St Wenceslas for Wenceslas Square. According to gallery information he made the statue of St George for St Nicholas Church in Prague, statues on the Continental insurance building and a memorial plaque in the Liberation Memorial, and was a member of the Jednota umělců výtvarných. In 1938 he made a bronze relief with a legionary motif for the Telč memorial to those who fell in the First World War. He died on 6 March 1959 in Prague.

Coins and medals

The plaquette – a relief of small format intended for private collecting as well as for society purposes – was Krepčík's principal field in small-scale sculpture. A catalogue of his sculptural, painted and graphic work is contained in Jan Buchta's Jaroslav Krepčík 1880–1959 (Galerie výtvarného umění v Hodoníně, 2017). Exhibitions of his work were held in 2018 by the Galerie plastik in Hořice and by the town of Telč.

From the work in the AUREA range

The AUREA range includes his bronze plaquette of 1914 with the portrait of the painter Joža Uprka, 65 × 48 mm, issued with the dedication To Its Members from the Association of Moravian Artists. The plaquette combines Krepčík's mastery of portraiture with the Moravian artistic milieu from which he came.