Tomáš Císařovský

Tomáš Císařovský has been fascinated with the medium of painting ever since he began creating art. He is among the most well-known Czech artists that formulated and pushed through works based on postmodernism on the mid-1980s Czech cultural scene. He presented his work along with his contemporaries at unofficial Konfrontace (Confrontation) exhibitions of the works of young artists (begun in 1984) at which an aesthetics of spontaneous neo-expressive art prevailed. His Targets paintings presented at the Konfrontace exhibitions approach in style the Italian Transavantgarde movement of that time.

In another phase of his work along with other members of and friends from the group Tvrdohlaví strove more for a postmodern perception of painting. He began to see painting as a linquistical game and experimented with its visual language. Around the turn of the 1990s he introduced individual and collective memory and its narratives as themes in his paintings. These corresponded both to a historicism connected to the postmodern, as well as to a recollection of the light sides of Czech history, which we could place in context with the then collapse of the totalitarian system. An important extensive cycle of canvases from this period is entitled From the Journal of Grandpa the Legionnaire. A parallel narrative of the story through the picture and text is typical for him.

Since the 1990s Tomáš Císařovský has collaborated on projects of Gallery MXM in Prague. He found models for his works in newspaper or family photographs, from which he chose detailed cut-outs. Among his numerous exhibitions organized in the 1990s, those canvases presented at the following exhibitions are especially worth mentioning: Seen by Two prepared with his wife Erika in 1993, Change the Channel, Naty (1994) and Horseless (1996). In 2000 he prepared with other colleagues an exhibition at the City Gallery Prague entitled And What Are You Thinking About. Here his figures and their gestures are specific, materially conceived signs of visual language, and he coherently works with the effect of striking colours.

In recent years the narrative ideas depicted in the works of Tomáš Císařovský has changed. The artist turned for inspiration to the period following the Second World War, deepened the expressive tone of colour on the canvas and thus also allowed for a greater existential message in his work.