Jiří Hauschka

‘I am like a fascinated pilgrim and painting is the best way, how to show, what the world of my pilgrimage looks like.’

Jiří Hauschka

Hauschka has no formal training as a painter and did not pursue it professionally, until he was thirty eight. Therefore, despite having grown up in the Communist regime, he did not have the same experiences of its constrictions as other artists working during that time. He joined the Stuckist Group in 2004 and his art making evolved. As British art curator and critic Edward Lucie-Smith states ‘A striking feature of these paintings is that they are examples of “what only paint can do”. There is nothing timid or photographic about them. The movement of the brush and the actual substance of the paint is always something that is strongly present. This becomes even more striking when one learns that the compositions are originally sketched on a computer before being transferred to canvas. Two apparently contrary approaches to image making – the purely technological and the visibly hand-made – are integrated with astonishing smoothness and confidence’.

In the present work, a myriad of colours seem to swallow shadowy figures and loneliness permeates the dreamlike forest. This is possibly a reflection of the artist’s own state of mind, as he trespasses boundaries set by traditional teachings and ‘rules’.