Infinite Inspiration

Where beautiful chaos becomes art — and community

A letter from Prince Edward, then the Earl of Wessex (now The Duke of Edinburgh), sits on Edmonton artist Slavo Cech’s mantel. It’s addressed to Cech, thanking him for an abstract bison sculpture that he made as a commission by the City of Edmonton to commemorate Prince Edward’s visit during the Commonwealth Games summit.

It’s just one of many examples of Cech’s international success, which has spanned 40 years, with his nature-inspired metal sculptures shown in galleries from England to Montreal and closer to home. 

Cech was surrounded by creativity and art from an early age—his mom designed patterns for glassware, and his dad designed factory equipment in Česká Lípa, an historic crystal glass-producing hub in the Czech Republic (now known as Czechia) where he was born. 

In the late 60s, when Cech was four years old, his family fled the Russian invasion, immigrating to Edmonton. As a child of immigrants, he felt a strong drive to do something more practical than art as a profession, which eventually led to a two-year marketing diploma from NAIT. 

“I have a really strong work ethic from my parents. When they first came to Edmonton, they worked three jobs. There was no slacking. It’s not that they were hard on us, but they led by example, and I wanted to make them proud,” says Cech. 

He used knowledge gained from his diploma, along with skills acquired from a job he’d had in high school—working at a Christmas decoration company—to start his own metalworking business, crafting holiday decor for towns, malls and other public places. While it was profitable in its first year, it didn’t inspire him enough creatively. After all, there are only so many ways to craft candy canes, snowflakes or Santas, he says. 

“It just started to get a little stagnant, so I went back to the U of A. This was in the early 90s, and I studied art and design, and actually never finished, because I just got too busy with creating metal sculptures,” Cech says.

Metal was the ideal material because it could easily be shaped into flowing pieces that reflected what he calls the infinite inspiration and beautiful chaos found in nature. His early pieces had a 1930s industrial aesthetic before evolving to ones featuring softer lines and bold colours. 

Around 1990, a dealer sent several pieces to New York, where they ended up in various private collections owned by high-profile families in fashion, entertainment and finance. His global reach extended when he later signed on with Saatchi Art, an international online platform with many Middle Eastern clients interested in his work. 

His work is also popular closer to home with the City of Edmonton commissions, including a small steel sculpture of a bison crafted in 2015 for Oilers’ coach and general manager, Glen Sather. 

For Cech, community building and connecting are a huge part of what he loves about his work. That desire for connection was especially strong at the beginning of the pandemic. 

“I started to feel the collective angst of everyone, and I thought: Well, what can I as one person do to create an activity that’s safe and fun?” he says. The quandary inspired him to

post clues on his social media page about where he hid one of his sculptures in the Edmonton river valley. Followers were encouraged to use those clues to find the sculpture that they could then keep. Soon, it was a whole online community where participants shared where they had looked and where others could look, says Cech, describing it as the right idea at the right time. 

It was so cathartic that the art hunts have become a ritual: four times a year, Cech hides a piece in the river valley, and Edmonton shows up to find it.

Some artists measure success in commissions, in gallery walls, in letters from royalty. Cech measures it in that, too — but also in the moment a stranger stumbles through the trees and finds something beautiful waiting for them.