Frank Vavruska

The Gallery Seeks early paintings by Frank Vavruska, contact: info@GalleryofWisconsinArt.com

BORN: 1917, Antigo, Wisconsin

DIED: 1974, Chicago, Illinois

Frank Vavruska was born in Antigo, Wisconsin, to parents with Czech heritage.

He studied art at University of Wisconsin (1935-38) and the Art Institute of Chicago (1938-41), where he took a BFA and was awarded the Ryerson Traveling Fellowship, which enabled him to paint and travel in Mexico (1941-42, again 1945-46).

While enlisted in the US Army during WWII, he was hospitalized in England. Even during that time, Vavruska produced many paintings which he used as the basis for a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1945. In 1948, a painting of his was selected for the important Abstraction & Surrealism in American Art exhibition at the Art Institute, and the painting was reproduced in the show’s catalog.

Primarily based in Chicago, Vavruska was a nomad at heart. He worked for two years in the Yucatan Peninsula, and was commissioned to make a mural for the Archeological Museum in Campeche. While there, he developed an avid interest in the archeological richness of the region which is reflected in his early figurative work of the period. 

The artist lived in Europe for six years, mainly in southern France, and he traveled in North Africa, Italy, Paris, and spent a year in London.

In the late ’40s, his work began to shift from the expressionist figurative basis it initially had towards a purer form of abstraction, and his work from the early ’50s bears some resemblance to the work of COBRA artists of Northern Europe, some of which he may have seen at the time. These rough abstract paintings were part of exhibitions at the Metropolitan (American Painting Today, 1950), Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1957), Madison Square Garden (Art U.S.A., 1958), and elsewhere.

In the ’60s, inspired by rubbings he had made of landmark archeological sites in Mexico, Vavruska began to make paintings based on rubbings of Chicago manhole covers, which the press dubbed “sewerrealism.”

Vavruska was known primarily as a painter and printmaker.

He died in 1974, at a very early age 56.