Mikuláš Medek (1926–1974)

Mikuláš Medek is recognised today as one of the most important and original figures in the visual art of the second half of the twentieth century, and not just in the Czech Republic. The painter became an icon because of the extraordinarily important content of his work, the magical strength of his painterly signature and, above all, the spiritual energy that radiates from his paintings.

 

Mikuláš Medek was the grandson of the landscape painter Antonín Slavíček and the son of General Rudolf Medek, an important author of Czech legionary literature. He studied art in Prague at the State Graphic School (1942–1944), briefly attended the Academy of Fine Arts, studying under K. Minář and V. Rada (1945–1946), and also studied at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, under the tutelage of F. Tichý (1946–1949). After the communist coup in 1949, he was expelled from the school for ideological reasons and obtained his first commissions, usually in the areas of applied graphics or restoration work, with great difficulty. Privately, he created works in the spirit of Surrealism (The World of an Onion, 1945), which took on a strong, existential undertone when human characters in space, trapped in an almost grotesque way in their internal, tragic, painful and enigmatic dimension emerged as their central theme (the cycles Events, Food, Naked in the Thorns, Games). Around 1951, Medek became part of the group of artists and poets concentrated around Karel Teige and at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, became, along with Vladimír Boudník, an inspiring example for a younger generation of artists responding to the international Art Informel movement.

 

In his “prepared” paintings, Medek composed masses of colour (often combining oil paint with enamel, which afforded him a more brutal means of intervention into the materials) into flat symbols. He projected issues related to basic questions about the meaning of human life into them, experimenting with rendering the artist’s changing thought process during the act of creation in an abstract manner. He was able to present his work publicly only in 1963, when, along with his friend, the sculptor and painter Jan Koblasa, he organised a famous exhibition in Teplice. Thanks to the relatively free political atmosphere, he was admitted to the Union of Visual Artists and managed to exhibit abroad several times. In the final phase of his life, he developed imaginative painting, which attained an almost mystical character through the symbolism of sign systems (motifs of angels, “evil” birds and machine heads). The central motif of these works remained human destiny conveyed through his own emotive expression. His promising career was interrupted by the events of 1968 and then a difficult illness, which accompanied the cycle Moving Graves. The artist succumbed in 1974 at the untimely age of 48.