sign. on the reverse DAVID 90, note on the reverse KARLOVI v úctě JIRKA 6. 10. 98 1730 hod „ZÁZRAK“, on the reverse paper label 44 Biennale 1990
Short item description
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 the international Aperto show at the 44th Venice Biennale, prepared by the eminent curator and theorist of the Italian transavant-garde Achillo Benito Oliva. Among them was the offered painting Miracle from 1990 with a fragment of a well-known Christian scene. By this time, David's painting 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 Prague student Confrontations (from 1984) and was at the origin of the Hardheads group (in 1987). His new images were based more on the feeling David conveyed in his manifestation texts entitled Total Distance in the Period of Social Fading and Reality as Fragmentary Materiality, which he published in 1988 in the samizdat anthology Somewhere Something. In them, he responded to the emptiness of late normalisation and the feeling of the loss of "big stories". The paintings often take the form of pictorial schemes - an indeterminate monochrome space into which fragments from various unrelated realities are inserted. They combine painting and drawing, captured in the form of a disinterested commentary, without moral or existential attitudes or symbolic language. Since the 1990s, David has also been working on photographic collections, objects and installations, but has continuously returned to painting, especially in the last fifteen years working with a variety of processes and means of expression, for example combining different layers of paint, spray paint and stencils to form a multi-layered, often abstracted pictorial space.
