David Němec: A Real Event
- Where: Montmartre Gallery
- When: November 6, 2012 – January 13, 2013
In his work, David Němec – who is showing his art from the last 15 years at Galerie Montmartre – primarily focuses on figural motifs, attempting to capture spiritual realities. His pictures come primarily from the Czech painting tradition of the 1960s. It could perhaps be said that they have been inspired by the work of the artists Mikuláš Medek and Otakar Slavík, close friends of Němec’s family who moved in the Charter 77 and underground circles centred on the legendary flat on Ječná St. where David Němec grew up.
Němec’s paintings are very suggestive, thanks to both their colourfulness and their surface. Their colourfulness in particular is very important, operating as a structure, not bound to any definite shape. Němec exclusively employs striking red and blue colours, the symbolic combination of which creates an incredibly spiritual impression. Mikuláš Medek used those colours as absolutes – “because they’re from metal – blue from iron and silver, red from gold”. His reduced figures operate on a plane without light as objects charged with tension. He achieves disturbed surfaces by means of floral designs that appear to have injured the figures in the pictures. They are perhaps tracks or scars. This painful eradiation of the paintings strongly captures the experience of their own existence. Bodies carrying the burdens of life and a sense of absurdity. In the early 1980s the theoretician Ivan Martin Jirous hit the nail on the head: “Imbosh art […] is what I call that part of contemporary Czech art living in the underground of the official world of appearances [...]. Imbosh is the English word for the foam at the mouth of a hunted animal.” On the other hand, the paintings convey a feeling of a strong spiritual charge and hope, in a similar manner to Gothic altar pictures.
Among the pieces on show is the painting Mává (Waves), which was lent to Václav Havel, who installed it at reception at his office at Prague Castle.
Marianna Placáková