Michal Drozen

Michal Drozen  is a graduate from the Jiří Petrbok drawing studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (AVU). However, professionally he works with various different media, including drawing, painting and graphic design, as well as literary and musical works. His works always examine the proximate, most recently experienced world depicted in large cycles and on a precisely defined scale. He places the investigated surroundings before us in dozens of variations, from many perspectives, and by means of the seemingly trivial. At first sight the everyday themes within the context of the artwork represent another way of discovering and revealing oneself.

Fruit (2011) is both journal and reality in one. Hundreds of water colours of fruit with the manufacturer’s label still affixed convince us that each piece of fruit actually existed and that Michal held it in his hand. The book containing drawings of prefab housing blocks block of Flats 1–3 depicts the environment in which the artist lives and works. NTK Poems (2014) was created during work experience at the National Technical Library and Drozen describes his life as a custodian. The formats and cycles that Drozen creates always have a clearly defined dimension and scope. In the case of the NTK Poems this represents eleven poems and four chapters.

Over recent years he has focused on the self portrait, saying that “perhaps there was no option other than to begin portraying myself “. These are again large, precisely defined cycles of realistic painting based on photographs. At the exhibition of finalists of the Critics’ Prize in 2014, he exhibited a larger-than-life frontal self portrait (220 cm x 160 cm) that paraphrases ID card photography, the life-size figure of Míša and his own cassette recordings Lužiny Recordings from 2006–2014. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 2014 with his diploma work Indie Hero. In four four-metre paintings he admits to his role as strange antihero of the urban housing subculture, and in the series Little Heroes (48 self portraits sized 35 cm x 20 cm), which comprises the second half of this work, he expressed a certain internal insecurity by means of colour, approach and size.

A year later he prepared a series of portraits of himself and his girlfriend Linda for START UP at the Prague City Gallery entitled Start up End down. Linda took most of the photography on the basis of which the paintings were created. These are generic moments and shared experiences, and therefore Linda herself appears in the images. While her diploma work was devoted to the question of stylisation into a certain role, Start up End down is a kind of journal, a documentation of Drozen’s life and their relationship.

In 2016, Drozen worked with double portraits. In the cycle Dvojice exhibited on the premises of the Petrohrad collective on two-metre canvases, he presents himself alongside himself and supplements the self-portraits, or indeed divides them, with paintings of radios, cables and drawers that compositionally form a whole. Here too he draws on items from his immediate surroundings, e.g. the radio he uses in his studio. At Gallery 209 in Brno in the same year he displayed portraits of Linda. These were again paintings based on photographs, this time taken by Linda, making them portraits of self-portraits.

Several of Drozen’s works give the impression of being unfinished and flattened and he is still in the process of gradually developing and modifying his trademark style. Recently he has been painting self-portraits without photos, and in both the portrait and the painting he works with a greater degree of stylisation. However, the figures in his paintings remain placed in front of a monochrome or vague backdrop. As well as scale and the multiplicity of themes, Drozen retains his interest in the installation, composition and context of the presentation of his works.

SÝKOROVÁ, Lenka (ed.): Postkonceptuální přesahy v České kresbě. Ústí nad Labem: FUD UJEP, 2015