Jiří Valenta was born in Prague on August 6, 1936. He attended the Art School in Prague (1951–1953). At the age of seventeen, he passed the entrance exams to the Academy of Fine Arts, received a special dispensation, and studied in the studios of Professors Miloslav Holý and Karel Souček (1953–1959). He worked across painting, drawing, and graphics. Together with Jan Koblasa, he became a leading figure of the youngest and most radical generation of artists. The exhibition Konfrontace I (Confrontation I, 1960), which introduced Art Informel abstraction into Czech art, was held in his studio.

Light and geometric morphology, intertwined with subtle references to the human body, played a central role in his artistic expression. From the 1960s onward, he participated in numerous exhibitions in Czechoslovakia and abroad, including the Fourth Youth Biennale in Paris (1965), and held solo exhibitions in Brno (1965) and Prague (1966). In the autumn of 1968, he emigrated to West Germany. Initially, he lived and worked in Hof Dodau near Eutin (1968–1969) and exhibited in Kiel, Hannover, Hamburg, and Celle. In 1970, he moved to Plön, and in 1971, he received a year-long scholarship from the Emil Nolde Foundation in Seebüll. Drawing on a complex geometric system that emphasized the transparency of spatial planes and suggested the presence of the human body, he created cycles of drawings and paintings. After a brief stay in Brühl, he settled in Cologne in 1972. In his paintings, he reached a state of pure transcendence – a dialogue of white on white. In 1979, he stopped painting and turned his focus to photography. He took part in several group exhibitions in Germany. In the spring of 1991, he visited Prague, but on July 11, 1991, he died of a malignant disease in Cologne. His work is held in both Czech and international public and private collections.

From the beginning of his career, Valenta focused on figural themes in both painting and graphics. Toward the end of his studies (1958), he was influenced by the work of Jean Dubuffet, who deconstructed traditional figure representation. Inspired by this approach, Valenta began to radically alter his concept of the human body, learning to see the world with “different” eyes, in its raw, unfiltered state. This transformation is evident in his depictions of nudes, which he reimagined in etchings, drawings, and paintings as flat, contoured, rudimentary signs, evoking fertility idols or, at times, children’s creations.

In his pursuit of alignment with the contemporary avant-garde, Valenta enthusiastically broke away from formal conventions. A first indication of this boldness appeared in his Bílé masky (White Masks) series of linocuts, created during his final year at the Academy. Unexpectedly, he conceived them as negative, imaginatively reduced flat signs. In terms of intention and concept, they diverged from his simplified representations of the female body. Here, the artist focused only on facial expression, transforming it into fragmented suggestions marked by stark black-and-white contrasts. Particularly striking are the linocuts whose radically simplified forms verge on abstraction – works that, at the time, had few, if any, parallels.