MIROSLAVA ZYCHOVÁ & BOHUMÍR KOMÍNEK / ONE PLACE TWO PATHS

Chateau Klenová

29. 3. - 7. 6. 2015, opening reception 28 March 2015 at 4pm

One Place: Hlinsko in Bohemia

Two Paths: Painter/graphic artist Miroslava Zychová and painter/photographer Bohumír Komínek.

Mirka Zychová (12 Nov. 1945, Polička) lives and works in Hlinsko and in Prague. When she was 15, she left Hlinsko for Prague, where she studied at the local secondary school of art (1960–64) and then under Ladislav Čepelák and Karel Souček at the Academy of Fine Arts (1965–71). After several years of studying in Prague, she again met her life partner Bohumír Komínek in Hlinsko, where they helped to save a neighborhood of traditional rural houses along the Chrudimka River. The houses – collectively known as Bethlehem – are today one of the town’s main attractions. Zychová lives in Hlinsko to this day.

In her work, Zychová captures the time in which she lives in her own unique way. She paints absurd still-lifes that look as if she had made them up. After arraging them in her head, she does so in real life. If they contain abstract shapes, then she gives them real form, too, before painting everything according to this model. Her meticulous painting style could thus be called realistic, although in the end she is better described as possessing a specific fantasy-like visual poetry filled with a strange balance of sorrow and hope that as a painter of realistic scenes par excellence.

Her work is found in private collections and in the collections of the National Gallery, the Czech Museum of Fine Arts, City Gallery Prague, the National Museum in Prague, Prague 3 Municipal Gallery, the Aleš South Bohemian Gallery in Hluboká nad Vltavou, GVU Karlovy Vary, GVU Náchod, GVU Pardubice, GVU Polička, and GVU Havlíčkův Brod.

One of the most remarkable self-taught individuals on the Czech art scenes, the painter and photographer Bohumír Komínek (15 March 1944, Hlinsko – 10 June 1999, Hlinsko) lived and worked in Hlinsko in Bohemia, where he met his life partner Mirka Zychová. Komínek was drawn to art while still at primary school. However, because of his “unreliable” background, he was not allowed to study higher education, and so he apprenticed as a tool-maker. As a young man – almost certainly in part because of the stress of working a job not of his choosing – he grew seriously ill and incapable of performing his blue-collar profession. He first worked as a projectionist at the local repertory cinema, but began to paint after he was banned from performing this “subversive” activity. In this roundabout way, he thus came back to painting, toward which he had been drawn as a child. Paradoxically, his art developed freely under these unfavorable outside circumstances, its direction determined by his own artistic and critical spirit – an approach that was essentially denied to the era’s students of painting at the Academy. Komínek developed a personal illusionary relief involving the specific use of paints and watercolors with an admixture of latex. He painted for just seven years before quitting because of an eye disease, but he worked intensely for this short time, producing a remarkable contribution to Czech art. His own particular magic realism fittingly and impressively captures the mood and features of the post-1968 period of “Normalization” in a small Czech town.

His work can be found at the Havlíčkův Brod Gallery of Fine Art and the North Bohemian Gallery of Fine Art in Litoměřice.

Lucie Šiklová, exhibition curator