mixed media, tempera, cardboard, 27,5 × 44 cm, mounted, frame, glass, signed bottom right J. K.
Obtained from the collection of Oldřich Kocián in Humpolec December 2001.
The offered painting View from a Room comes from the early period of painting
of Jan Kotík's work, from the 1940s, when the author worked as a member of Group 42. The group's program, defined by the manifesto The World, of Jindřich Chalupecký, was based on the poetics of urban man and the environment of the periphery, with a leaning towards civility and everyday reality. Kotík's work in this period was partly based on from post-Cubist morphology and at the same time tended towards simplification, abstraction of the initial motif. Interior of a room with a common scene, which shows a seated figure looking through an open window at night sky, is repeated several times in his work. The civil poetics of the painting still contains cubist abbreviations, but at the same time leads to the isolation individual abstract parts. In the 1950s Kotík came of age to complete gestural painterly abstraction. His other painting, drawing work continued in a form reduction, often based on the human figure, expressive gestural and colour painting and experimental exploration the form of the image, and its spatial possibilities in a series of conceptual and object-based works.
Jan Kotík (1916-2002), painter, graphic designer, industrial artist, studied
1935-1941 at the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Prague. In the 1940s, he was a member of Group 42, the Artistic Beseda and the Hollar. In the fifties he cooperated with the glassworks in Škrdlovice and was a member of the industrial artists' group Bilance. He participated in World Exhibitions Expo 58 in Brussels, Expo 67 in Montreal. In 1969 emigrated to Germany, where he settled permanently. In 1992-2002 he was a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts. Jan Kotík is one of the important Czech artists in exile. His work is represented in important international and Czech collections.
