Václav Stratil is an artist who moves between different media, not primarily to use them as an intermedial medium for his themes, but rather to relate to them and reflect on them in the context of the contemporary operation of art and its place in society. Just as he works with media, or with art in general, he self-reflectively explores the identity of the artist in today's world. He uses himself as the material and object of a number of his significant artistic realizations, performative, photographic and painted works. He does so with humor, exaggeration, but also quite seriously. He repeatedly returns to painting, which he had been engaged in since the 1970s during his university studies in Olomouc, when he reacted to its modernist origins. He works with text, first in his abstract procedural large-format hatched drawings, later in his pictorial messages and inscriptions. Since the beginning of the 1990s, he has been dealing with the theme of self-portraiture and playing with his own image.
