Luděk Filipský / Drops of Lights

WHITE UNICORN GALLERY IN KLATOVY

13. 1. 2018 - 18. 3. 2018, opening reception 12. 1. 2018 at 18:00

Luděk Filipský, born 23 January 1945 in Moravské Budějovice, graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, student of Antonín Pelc and Jan Smetana.

Like the rest of his generation, an initial enthusiasm for trying to understand the human  condition and social relationships through original works of art led Luděk Filipský to partially cross the boundaries between previously self-contained artistic disciplines and to work more loosely with the various artistic media. His existential view of the state of mankind and society  led him to transcend all established norms of how to work with the traditional tools of the visual arts. Painting and drawing expanded into the third dimension, while sculptures and object art were combined with painting within one installation.

The results were manifested in a series of three-dimensional objects; something like drawings rooted in space, gestures by which the artist appropriates, delineates, and establishes a space for life, fixing fragile certainties within the expansiveness of a previously undifferentiated and undescribed world.

Concurrently with these three-dimensional objects, Filipský also explored questions of mass, space, and light as the fundamental constituting elements of the world, creating a series of works on paper (or rather, with artistically worked paper, often lacerated and scratched) that shaped and transformed light as if depicting the very structure of the cosmos in its primal order.

At the time, light, space, and matter were clearly the most important, central theme of Filipský's work.

After this exploration of three-dimensional objects, Filipský went back to the two dimensions of paper or canvas, returning to paintings capable of using purely painterly techniques to speak about light, space, matter, and time.>

This transformation was first evident in a series of small colorful ink drawings. Working with a slow and painstaking pen-and-ink technique, he created a complicated and multilayered web in which the viewer perceives colored space not as a clearly defined mass, but as living light that creates the space of the world in which we are immersed. In these drawings, light, space, and mass are of the same kin. 

Luděk Filipský's exhibition at the White Unicorn Gallery in Klatovy focuses on his paintings from roughly the past ten years, whose foundations lie in these aforementioned drawings,

His purely painterly works are undoubtedly among the most distinctive within contemporary Czech art.