At the beginning of the 1990s Jiří David was one of the few Czech
artists of the emerging artistic generation who made a name for himself
in the international artistic environment. In 1989 he exhibited for the first time
in New York, and the following year several of his paintings were selected for
international show Aperto at the 44th Venice Biennale, prepared by
by the renowned curator and theoretician of the Italian transavantgarde Achillo
Benito Oliva. These included the offered painting Miracle from 1990
with a fragment of a famous Christian scene. David's painting had already
by this time had already experienced the neo-expressive and postmodern
work of the German and Italian movements of the second half of the 1980s
when David initiated the confrontational meetings of the Prague student
Confrontations (from 1984) and was the founder of the Hardheads group (in 1987).
His new paintings were based more on the feeling that David conveyed
in his manifesto texts entitled Total Distance in the
Social Fading and Reality as Fragmentary Materiality, which in
1988 in the samizdat anthology Somewhere Something. He responded in them
to the emptiness of late normalization and the feeling of losing the ""great
stories"". The paintings often take the form of pictorial schemes - vague
monochromatic space into which fragments from various
unrelated realities. They combine the painterly and the drawing record
captured in the form of a disinterested commentary, without moral or
existential attitudes and symbolic language. Since the 1990s, the
David has also been making photographic collections, objects and installations,
but has continually returned to painting, especially in the last 15 years.
working with a variety of processes and means of expression, for example
combining different layers of paint, spray paint and stencils to create
multi-layered, often abstracted pictorial space.
