Adam Štech
Finger
Artist
Adam Štech
(1980, Podbořany), Czech
Original Title
Finger
Date2011
Mediumacrylic, hair, enamel and glass on canvas
Dimensions120 × 100 cm
Classificationspaintings
Credit LineKunsthalle Praha (Eva and Petr Zeman Collection)
DescriptionAdam Štech is a Czech artist whose practice primarily focuses on painting. His work draws on art historic discourses, quotations, and classical painterly themes such as still lifes and figurative scenes as well as landscapes, nudes, draperies, and self-portraits. His approach is based on a formal playfulness through which he creates new visual environments and aesthetic values. Despite the sophistication of his paintings, an important feature of his work is challenging the primacy of aesthetic art. In early works, he achieved this aim by incorporating human hair into structural paintings; later, it became expressed through an aggressive treatment of figures, imbuing his works with a constant tension between beauty and ugliness as well as celebration and deprecation. The aggression directed at the figure takes the form of its constant deconstruction and subsequent collagist composition into hybrid forms, which can be understood as a reflection of a fluid and perpetually changing reality. Štech’s open, eclectic relation to historical art styles and movements also highlights the importance of engaging with the work of famous painters, particularly to cubism and its most prominent figure, Pablo Picasso, but also to much older historical periods of European painting. His inclination toward metaphorical irony, a sense of absurdity, and thematization of questions related to contemporary society propel his postmodern approach from a mere skill measuring contest to a sophisticated, multilayered visual game. The eye-catching colors of his canvases are employed to create harmonic or decadently disharmonic compositions.
Finger (2011) demonstrates Štech’s ability to combine mutually extraneous elements into a whole, allowing him to create cryptic and simultaneously absurd works. Set against a textured, abstract background adorned with human hair, we find a drawn male portrait with a missing face, which has been substituted by a levitating human finger. Štech thus intentionally challenges the a priori aesthetic effect of his paintings while simultaneously furthering their interpretive ambiguity. He treats painting and traditional painterly motifs as components of a game, which can be freely rearranged into new wholes with multifaceted meanings.
Adam Štech (born 1980, Podbořany, Czech Republic) is a painter living and working in Prague. He studied painting in Jiří Sopko’s and Vladimír Skrepl’s studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague from 2001 to 2008, extending his studies by studying abroad at the Bellas Artes in Porto. His work has been featured in exhibitions mapping contemporary tendencies in painting such as Resetting: Different Paths to Eternity (Prague City Gallery, 2007), The Butterfly Effect (Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, 2013), Disrupted Imagination (Art Mill Gallery, Szentendre, 2017), What is Contemporary Painting? (New Zlín Salon, Regional Gallery of Fine Arts in Zlín, 2017), Retina: Possibilities of Painting (Art Zone 8smička, Humpolec, 2019), Needles in the Hay (The Curators Room, Amsterdam, 2021). In 2011, he received the Critics’ Prize for Young Painting. Štech’s most recent exhibitions took place at the Václav Špála Gallery and the DSC Gallery in Prague.
Finger (2011) demonstrates Štech’s ability to combine mutually extraneous elements into a whole, allowing him to create cryptic and simultaneously absurd works. Set against a textured, abstract background adorned with human hair, we find a drawn male portrait with a missing face, which has been substituted by a levitating human finger. Štech thus intentionally challenges the a priori aesthetic effect of his paintings while simultaneously furthering their interpretive ambiguity. He treats painting and traditional painterly motifs as components of a game, which can be freely rearranged into new wholes with multifaceted meanings.
Adam Štech (born 1980, Podbořany, Czech Republic) is a painter living and working in Prague. He studied painting in Jiří Sopko’s and Vladimír Skrepl’s studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague from 2001 to 2008, extending his studies by studying abroad at the Bellas Artes in Porto. His work has been featured in exhibitions mapping contemporary tendencies in painting such as Resetting: Different Paths to Eternity (Prague City Gallery, 2007), The Butterfly Effect (Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, 2013), Disrupted Imagination (Art Mill Gallery, Szentendre, 2017), What is Contemporary Painting? (New Zlín Salon, Regional Gallery of Fine Arts in Zlín, 2017), Retina: Possibilities of Painting (Art Zone 8smička, Humpolec, 2019), Needles in the Hay (The Curators Room, Amsterdam, 2021). In 2011, he received the Critics’ Prize for Young Painting. Štech’s most recent exhibitions took place at the Václav Špála Gallery and the DSC Gallery in Prague.
Adam Štech
