Gold Ounce Medal Oldřich Kulhánek 75th Anniversary of Birth 2015 Proof

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Gold medal on the 75th anniversary of Oldřich Kulhánek

Oldřich Kulhánek (26 February 1940 Prague - 28 January 2013) was a Czech painter, graphic artist, illustrator, scenographer and teacher. He designed the graphic design of contemporary Czech banknotes and created many Czech postage stamps. He was persecuted under the previous regime for his prints, which allegedly defamed the representatives of former socialist countries.

He was prosecuted from 1968 and arrested by the StB in March 1971 and imprisoned. At that time, he was accused of defaming the representatives of communist countries with his graphic letters with the face of Stalin. A total of eleven prints, which the regime deemed "ideologically dangerous", featured Stalin's deformed face, perforated five-pointed stars, and faces of building joy turned into hideous grins. In the fabricated case called Kulhanek and Co., his colleague and friend Krejčí was tried together with him. Afterwards, he spent a month in prison and had to attend regular interrogations. The case ended with a trial at the District Court for Prague 10 (5 July 1973), where his 11 graphic sheets were sentenced to liquidation. However, his family and friends managed to hide the matrices for these sheets until 1989, so that in the early 1990s a limited edition was printed from them, called Prohibita.

In 1958, he was admitted to the graphic design studio of Prof. Karel Svolinsky (1896-1986) at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he graduated in 1964. He began his professional career with his diploma thesis, illustrations for a book of poems by Vladimír Holan, Sen. He had his first solo exhibition in 1968 at the Young Gallery in Prague together with the painter Jan Krejčí. He designed a new banknote for the first time in 1971, when his ten-crown won an anonymous audition. However, the banknote with the theme of Mister Pavel of Levoča did not make it to the printers. Throughout the 1970s, he was banned from exhibitions, banned from working with publishers and banned from publicity. Despite this, some of his works managed to get behind the Iron Curtain illegally - for example, in 1971, under the pseudonym Ulrich Böhm, he participated in an exhibition in Nuremberg with his graphic sheet Hommage á Albrecht Dürer.In the 1980s, he created lithographs inspired by the development of the human body. Despite the ban, some colleagues allowed him to illustrate books, especially Russian classics. His famous series Faces and Hands, graphic sheets inspired by the work of George Orwell and stylized likenesses of historical figures (Johannes Kepler, Tycho de Brahe and Rudolf II) also date from the 1980s.

Between 1992 and 1993 he worked on the design of new Czech banknotes and became the author of many Czech postage stamps - among other things he designed a postage stamp with a portrait of the President of the Czech Republic Václav Klaus. In 1995, he was a visiting professor at the University of Houston-Clear Lake in Texas. He is characterized by a preoccupation with the figure that runs throughout his work, a preoccupation that he uses to express a state of mind. In his work, one can find torsos of human faces and hands that are expressions of the time and place in which they live. He was one of the leading representatives of Czech ex libris and graphic art and received a number of prestigious awards; he was president of the SČUG Hollar Foundation.

From 1992 to 1993 he worked on the designs of eight Czech banknotes. The competition was announced by the federal State Bank of Czechoslovakia, but the motifs remained and, after a slight modification, were used on banknotes issued after the division of Czechoslovakia. On the 200 CZK banknote with Komenský, he painted the hands of an adult and a child as a symbol of the transfer of knowledge and experience. On the 1,000 koruna banknote with František Palacký, he depicted a lime tree as a symbol of the historian of the Czech nation.