Martin Kuriš * 1973 The Great Fight, 2000

The distinctive painting and illustration career of Martin Kuriš developed from the beginning outside the current artistic trends of the contemporary art scene. Kuriš’s visual world unfolds in the realm of pictorial narratives, developed as extensive narrative painting series in which reality intersects with fiction. The pictorial sets often serve as the starting point for further authorial book creation. Kuriš’s works are inspired by fairy tales, folk tales and stories, fables, and the literary world of fictional characters. Kuriš’s artistic expression is close to Naïve Art, children's drawings, but also the tradition of medieval pictorial storytelling and its method of rendering characters.

The scenes are set in the specific, sprawling, and gloomy landscape of Northern Bohemia, where Kuriš and his family have lived for a long time. The theme of family, specific close individuals, or the stories of local residents are loosely projected into the chosen paintings, but they gain a new form here, translated by the painter into a state of magical and symbolic depiction.

The offered painting, titled Velký zápas (The Great Fight) from 2000, comes from the series of paintings titled Profesor Frankenstein (Professor Frankenstein), referencing the fictional horror literary character, the artificial man created by the young genius scientist. The individual paintings, created over an extended period, contain separate stories in which naked human figures, mostly women and children, find themselves in an uninhabited landscape where they learn to live. They inhabit flimsy shelters, cook on an open fire, heat small stoves, and encounter animals, the natural inhabitants of the wilderness. Tension is present in their relationship and the overall expression of the paintings, along with the mysterious, unresolved causes of the depicted situations and their background. It does not offer a peaceful idyll but is rather a symbolic expression of the ambivalent relationship between man and nature and their disconnection.

Kuriš also publishes his extensive and loosely composed painting series in the form of authorial books, such as Don Giovanni, Magda, Baryk (2008), and Navara (2010); the latter two he also adapted into puppet theatre.

Martin Kuriš—painter, illustrator, sculptor—studied painting from 1994–1999 under Bedřich Dlouhý, František Hodonský, and Antonín Střížek at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (AVU). From 2006–2007, he continued his studies in Puppet Theatre Scenography at DAMU in Prague, and from 2007–2013, he completed a postgraduate program in Theory of Art Education at the Faculty of Education at Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem. He has served as an assistant professor at the local Faculty of Arts since 2005. He has received numerous awards for his illustration and book creation.