41 Jakub Špaňhel * 1976 Gingerbread Cottage, 2003

The painting style of Jakub Špaňhel was shaped at the beginning of his career by his experience as a member of the group Luxus, which championed a purely painterly approach to artistic creation in the second half of the 1990s. Its members defined themselves against conceptual tendencies and sophisticated positions of contemporary art by favoring the intelligibility and general communicability of their works. Their paintings possessed the courage, unruliness, and energy of the 1990s, no longer seeking to react to the societal transformation period, self-reflectively examine Czechoslovak identity, or catch up with Western art, but rather establishing their own themes with confidence and sovereignty. During this time, Jakub Špaňhel established himself as a distinctive expressive painter, whose style he himself describes as Expressive Impressionism.

The offered painting from 2003, created just one year after graduating, already bears all the hallmarks of his signature. The large-format painting, with its subdued, monochromatic coloration, uses expressive painterly means to depict the antithesis of light and shadow, similar to what we know from classical Baroque painting. In the same period, he also created a series of paintings on the theme of church interiors, which developed the potential for monumental impact and the impressive effects of light and space achieved through gestural painting. This was followed by cycles featuring themes of flowers, chandeliers, nudes, petrol pumps, or central banks—classical, historical genres, as well as contemporary subjects—often created based on a photograph or a reproduction of an artwork. These gained widespread recognition within his generation and were included in significant art surveys of the nineties and noughties.

In a certain contrast to this painting position is the ongoing series of works created using a paint roller, which creates a raster of repeating scenes on the canvas. The repetitive composition of the same motif, such as the well-known series featuring beer mugs, represents a different approach, limiting spontaneous painterly gesture in favor of using a stencil. Jakub Špaňhel is today one of the successful, established artists of the middle painting generation.