Many thanks to our friend Daniel,

we were astonished when we received the snapshots of the The Sting movie poster. Knowing it is his favourite movie makes us feel even happier with what we can see. Karel Machálek would be possibly also delighted, seeing it on such a great display. There is so much more than just love to his posters. Many are iconic by now and believe this marvel will be icon once, too.

Karel Machálek (b.1937) emigrated from Czechoslovakia to France in 1976. Believe he could have many reasons, but the main one was, that his exhibition in France / Lyon was taking longer than expected and Czechoslovak embassy did not want to extend his stay; he applied for asylum¹ .

This sort of courageous behaviour fits with Karel Machálek’s posters very well. His movie posters are just different dimension, nothing as such and they are indeed designed courageously. Karel Machálek left about 50 movie posters behind and every one of them talk. Not so much known, but together with painting/sculpture he was also poet with pseudonym Zlín. Collection of his early poems was not published in Czechoslovakia, until the end of Communism. We are very grateful for Karel Machálek’s addition to Czechoslovak poster art and also very glad seeing one of his movie poster, so beautifully preserved.

Thank you very much Daniel, to add white mount and framing pulls it out really nicely.

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Please explore wonderful movie posters of Karel Machálek in chronological order.
Or see other fascinating Paul Newman / Robert Redford movie posters in our shop / archive.

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Ref.
1. abArt archive / Karel Machálek.

Many thanks to Harriet,

for inviting us to her cosy little “showroom” and for taking such a beautiful care of two lovely movie posters from our archive. They look magnificent in their new surrounding and such a good combination, too. Two phenomenal, possibly most prolific poster designers of the time, both with full bag of poster awards and hundreds of poster designs in portfolio. We can be only astonished by amount/inventivness/variety of their work. While Zdeněk Ziegler was very much attached to graphic design, Karel Vaca was attracted to fine art, specially to abstract painting. Each of them influenced many and helped a lot with introducing Czechoslovak poster design internationally.

Zdeněk Ziegler’s poster design for The Wizz consists of only typeface, combination of Good Vibrations and Manuscript Caps (out of interest please, see also his Flashdance poster). It is excellent example of how far he would go when designing movie posters, truly fascinating. No words to what Karel Vaca did to Mona Lisa either :), such an intriguing, humorous artwork. It was possibly the first 60s Vaca’s poster we were holding in our hands few years back, it is deeply engraved on mind ever since. Karel Vaca was playing all over, nothing was sacred to him and most of the time one just stay speechless observing his art.

Most adorable, thank you so much for showing them to us!

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Please explore poster artwork of Karel Vaca / Zdeněk Ziegler in chronological order.
For all the information on typeface we thank to FONTS IN USE archive.

Thank you Claire and Séamus,

we’ve been beautifully touched when we’ve received your fantastic snapshots. Movie posters look fabulous, to add, black fits perfectly to both. Josef Vyleťal‘s Amarcord looks absolutely impressive, one can study any of his movie posters by millimetres. Only very recently we have learned that he was also designing movie sets for such a great directors as Juraj Jakubisko or Juraj Herz, his abilities were endless. Must say thanks to Communist regime and their ridiculous, believe if they would not be around, mr. Vyleťal is happily painting his surreal paintings and we would not be able to explore those beauties he created, well, who knows.

Different story to movie poster designing of Slovak fine artist Peter Kľúčik. His portfolio unlike that of Josef Vyleťal’s with over hundred posters (1964 – 1979) consists of only 5 illustrated movie posters (late 80’s). His main focus was lying on book illustration (many wonderful children books) and ex-libris that are full of surreal, unpredictable, sometimes even bizarre humour. There is great archive of Peter Kľúčik’s artwork in online archive of National Slovak Gallery.

Thank you for taking such lovely care of them !!

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Please explore fascinating movie posters of Peter Kľúčik / Josef Vyleťal in chronological order. Or see other interesting curiosities in our Federico Fellini / Italian Cinema archive.