Michal Pěchouček
Garden Benches
Artist
Michal Pěchouček
(1973, Duchcov), Czech
Original Title
Garden Benches
Date2011
Mediumacrylic and canvas pasted onto canvas
Dimensions160 × 200 × 4 cm
Classificationspaintings
Credit LineKunsthalle Praha
DescriptionMichal Pěchouček is a Czech artist working with painting, photography, graphics, video, and scenography. Demonstrating an ability to use traditional mediums to produce innovative artforms. His work is defined by an intuitive movement between an intellectual view and a naïve spontaneity and between dreamy illusionism and real-world materiality. Perhaps his best-known work is a series of textile assemblages, where pieces of clothing sewn into the works give the appearance of spatiality and simultaneously channel an intimacy characteristic of his oeuvre. Although Pěchouček periodically returns to painting, in recent years his primary form of expression has been video, which he uses to create short, mystery-charged stories.
This large-format canvas from the series Garden Benches depicts various incarnations of these deeply familiar resting spots, closely linked to Pěchouček’s memories. The variations included in the series differ only in the color of their planks and are placed on a neutral, gray background. The given degree of stylization was adopted so as to tread the thin line between veritable representation and a space for the viewer’s imagination. The benches are not rendered merely through painting—they also contain collaged strips of canvas covered int hick layers of paint. This intervention intentionally evokes technical imperfection, a reference to old benches with layered, multicolored coatings of paint, which gradually peel away, revealing older layers. Pěchouček thus spotlights the notorious antiaesthetic dimension of urban public space which was, until recently, shaped by the most cost-efficient yet simultaneously least permanent solutions.
Michal Pěchouček (* 1973, Teplice) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1999. Four years later, in 2003, he won the Jindřich Chalupecký Award. In 2006, he cofounded the 35M2 gallery and partook in defining its cultural program. From 2009 onward, he was involved in the cultural management of Prague’s MeetFactory art center and of several theatres. In 2011, the Prague City Gallery hosted a solo exhibition of Pěchouček’s work. In 2012, he stopped making art for several years and donated his works to the Moravian Gallery in Brno. Since 2020, he has been a lecturer in the Studio of Intermedia Confrontation at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague.
This large-format canvas from the series Garden Benches depicts various incarnations of these deeply familiar resting spots, closely linked to Pěchouček’s memories. The variations included in the series differ only in the color of their planks and are placed on a neutral, gray background. The given degree of stylization was adopted so as to tread the thin line between veritable representation and a space for the viewer’s imagination. The benches are not rendered merely through painting—they also contain collaged strips of canvas covered int hick layers of paint. This intervention intentionally evokes technical imperfection, a reference to old benches with layered, multicolored coatings of paint, which gradually peel away, revealing older layers. Pěchouček thus spotlights the notorious antiaesthetic dimension of urban public space which was, until recently, shaped by the most cost-efficient yet simultaneously least permanent solutions.
Michal Pěchouček (* 1973, Teplice) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1999. Four years later, in 2003, he won the Jindřich Chalupecký Award. In 2006, he cofounded the 35M2 gallery and partook in defining its cultural program. From 2009 onward, he was involved in the cultural management of Prague’s MeetFactory art center and of several theatres. In 2011, the Prague City Gallery hosted a solo exhibition of Pěchouček’s work. In 2012, he stopped making art for several years and donated his works to the Moravian Gallery in Brno. Since 2020, he has been a lecturer in the Studio of Intermedia Confrontation at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague.
Part of the same series/Part of the same series
