Mikuláš Medek

For Medek, the art that was most suitable to answer the problems of modern man in a modern world was surrealism. A great admirer of the painted surrealist works of Toyen and Max Ernst, as well as the literary works of Kafka and Rilke, Medek developed his own unique style of abstract surrealism. This involved placing organic forms – usually botanical or biological – and abstract elements accentuated by their colour structures onto a canvas that was prepared with oil paint and synthetic enamel. Within these compositions the coloured matter, its luminosity and surface structure became in itself the object to be depicted. Indeed, Medek's work is marked by a continuous tension, the source of which were dreams and traumatic childhood experiences, disturbing bodily feelings and self-destructive behaviour, as well as the immediate cultural and political situation, especially the complete isolation of Czechoslovakia from Western culture in the late 1940s to early 1960s.

In the 1950s, the Czech state sought to expunge modern art and thought. Artists who wished to remain true to their artistic vision painted only for themselves as they were not allowed to exhibit publicly, and communication with artists abroad was prohibited. By using synthetic enamel in his paintings, Medek deliberately chose a thoroughly modern medium as both subject matter and expressive means in his paintings. Medek treated the paint as a living matter, lacerating and scratching it with spatula, knife, fingernails and a sharp brush. The artist's intricate technique involved superimposing several layers of paint. 'The basic essentiality of Medek’s work (...) does perfect justice to the conception of a structural painting; it is a structure in the real sense of the word, an organism created in space and time, a structure of both significance and technique. His coloured structure does not merely lie on the canvas surface, but is the result of the whole creative process of painting in layers' (B. Mraz, Mikuláš Medek, 1970, p. 45).