Irena Sedlecka
Sculptor who went from depicting socialist icons to creating a 10-foot statue of Freddie Mercury
IRENA SEDLECKA, the sculptor, who has died aged 91, honed her technique making massive socialist-realist statues in Communist-era Czechoslovakia; after moving to Britain in 1966 she applied her skills to making much sought-after bronzes of actors, singers, musicians and other celebrities.
She was born on September 7 1928 into a middle-class family in Pilsen, western Czechoslovakia. Following the German invasion of 1939 her father, a publisher’s rep, was drafted to work in the Skoda Works at Mlada Boleslav, which had been turned into part of the Reichswerke Hermann Göring, making military equipment. All schools were closed and Irena and her younger sister, Jaroslava, were taught by their mother.
At the age of 16 Irena applied to train as a teacher but, although she was not Jewish, she failed a test of Aryan purity on account of her father having dark, curly hair. Instead she was sent to work in a wire factory.
She found refuge in drawing and making clay models. Even before the war ended she had made clay portraits of Communist heroes for a bookshop owner who wanted to display them in his shop once the Red Army arrived.
After the war, Irena studied sculpture at the Prague Academy of Fine Art, training in the Communist orthodox socialist-realist style on massive statues and reliefs in bronze and stone. She never regretted this training, finding that it liberated her creativity: “We were happy to mirror life. We did pieces that commented on the war, celebrated the army, the working class that were rebuilding the country. It was natural to follow the new style – we were living it,” she recalled in an interview with The Independent in 1998.
Irena Sedlecka went on to collaborate with others on larger projects, winning a competition to create a set of reliefs for the walls of the Lenin Museum in Prague by including portraits of town dignitaries alongside Lenin, Marx and other icons. She and two colleagues were then asked to do six more statues depicting heroic characteristics of the revolutionary state to decorate the roof of the building.
She sculpted an agent provocateur and a worker, while the others sculpted a mother and children, a machine-gunner, a corps commander and a Cossack. More than 40 years later she stumbled across the statues in an architectural salvage yard at Bramley in Surrey, where they were on sale as garden ornaments for £40,000 apiece.
In 1952 Irena Sedlecka had married Ludwig Kodym, a fellow sculptor, with whom she had two daughters. The marriage did not last, and in 1958 she married Stefan Drexler, a paediatrician with whom she had a son.
In 1966, by now disillusioned with Communism, the couple secured an invitation to visit London, but it did not include the children so, as children could travel without visas behind the Iron Curtain, they took them on a “camping holiday” to Yugoslavia.
There they met an English couple who had four children and discussed their plight with them. “They were camping in Yugoslavia and they were allowed to go to Italy on day trips,” Irena recalled. The couple left three of their children in Yugoslavia and smuggled Irena Sedlecka’s into Italy, returning some time later to collect their own. Irena and her husband crossed the border legally and the reunited family made their way to London.
To make ends meet Irena Sedlecka found work in a small company making replicas for the British Museum. But her husband’s medical qualifications were not recognised in Britain and life was a struggle. The marriage was eventually dissolved.
Irena Sedlecka’s first private commission was a 70 cm (27 in) resin statue of the Virgin and Child and she soon had a steady stream of commissions for realistic monumental figures and portrait busts.
Her subjects included Bobby Charlton, Frank Whittle, Charlie Chaplin and Ken Dodd, the elegant life-size bronze of Beau Brummell on Jermyn Street – and Professor Stephen Hawking, Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle for a “heroes’ garden” on the Warwickshire estate of the millionaire publisher Felix Dennis.
Irena Sedlecka was proudest of a 10 ft statue of Freddie Mercury, his right arm raised in triumph, made from photographs of his performance at the Live Aid concert at Wembley in 1985. It was unveiled in 1996 by the opera singer Montserrat Caballé on the shores of Lake Geneva at Montreux, where he recorded the album Jazz with Queen and subsequently often visited, to mark the fifth anniversary of the star’s death.
The statue is now one of the 10 most visited tourist attractions in Switzerland, and also served as the model for the large illuminated figure of Mercury which stood outside the Dominion Theatre in London from the 2002 premiere of the musical We Will Rock You until 2014.
In 1996 Irena Sedlecka married, thirdly, the Czech sculptor, Franta Belsky, a widower, who died in 2000.
Her three children survive her.
Irena Sedlecka, born September 7 1928, died August 4 2020