Academic painter, monumentalist, draughtsman, graphic artist, caricaturist, illustrator and educator Assoc. Prof. Imrich Vysočan was born on 23 September 1924 in Prievidza. During his grammar school years he began to discover his pronounced talent for drawing, which he further developed during his university studies at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, in the drawing and painting department. He studied under Professors Ján Mudroch, Gustáv Mallý, Dezider Milly and Jozef Kostka, who played a significant role in shaping the artistic outlook of several important artists of the generation emerging in the post-war period.

After graduating in 1948, Imrich Vysočan became actively involved in artistic and union activities. From the very beginning of his artistic career he presented himself to the public as an excellent graphic artist, draughtsman and illustrator of children’s literature. The formal and expressive simplicity and aesthetic immediacy of his work fully developed during the creative period of the 1960s and 1970s, when he created a hundred monumental works realised in architecture. Among the most well-known from this extensive body of work are the sgrafitos on the entrances of residential buildings on the Píly housing estate in Prievidza, the stone mosaics on the projecting lecture halls of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, and his artistic completion of primary school buildings and civic infrastructure buildings in several towns and villages.

During the period of his extensive work in architecture and free chamber painting, he was also actively working as a university lecturer — from 1952 to 1955 at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava as an assistant to Professor Majetka and secretary of the painting department. From 1962 to 1975 he was an associate professor at the Institute of Drawing at the Department of Theory and History of Architecture, Drawing and Modelling of the Faculty of Civil Engineering at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava.

Master Vysočan left behind an extensive body of artistic work for both the professional and general public. He painted hundreds of works across a wide range of techniques — oil paintings, watercolours, drawings, graphic works and studies. Worthy of particular attention are the painting The Revolt of the Women of Prievidza, the cycle of oil paintings depicting the princes of the Great Moravian Empire from 1971, and depictions of the changing Slovak landscape and corners of his native region. He also left behind many monumental works. He presented his works at dozens of solo and group exhibitions in Slovakia and abroad — in Prague, Moscow, Stockholm, Kyiv, Dresden and Kraków.

After an extraordinarily active life and career in Bratislava, he returned permanently to his native Prievidza in 1975, seeking peace and new subjects for his work in his home region.

He died on 9 November 1994 in Bojnice and is buried in Prievidza.

In April 2022, the Imrich Vysočan Gallery was opened in Prievidza in the Burgher’s House.

In Prievidza, on the Píly housing estate, Vysočan’s works can be found on Sama Chalupku, J. Sivák, J. Palkovič, Škopec and Banícka streets — house signs and figurative compositions spanning two storeys.