Remembering Walter Gaudnek, Influential Artist and Longtime UCF Professor
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Loading... - Adelino Langa
- 31 Oct 2022
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Longtime professor and renowned modern artist Walter Gaudnek died Sunday, Oct. 23, at the age of 91. Gaudnek taught in the art department at UCF for 50 years before retiring in 2020. Throughout his extensive professional career, he received worldwide acclaim as one of the main representatives of pop art that uses religious imagery.
Gaudnek was born in 1931 and endured forced labor as a child in Czechoslovakia following World War II. He later studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, and in 1957, received a Fulbright Scholarship which brought him to the United States. As an artist in New York amidst the art movements of the 1960s, he proclaimed his philosophy of polymorphism — the idea that a painting is never finished and can be continuously evolved.
He emerged in the public eye after being featured in the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) New Talent Exhibition, and later received a “best show of the year” review from the New York Times for his installation, Unlimited Dimensions. Gaudnek received a doctorate from NYU before he began teaching at UCF in 1970, where he helped establish the art department and taught for the next five decades. Read More...
