David Jiří *1956

Red Lions, 1988

oil on canvas, frame, 150 × 130 cm, signed on the reverse J. DAVID -Red Lions- 1988

Jiří David, Red Lions, 1988, from the series Home 1988-89 The offered painting by Jiří David from 1988 belongs to the important early painting cycle called Home. The cycle was created for a short time after his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he David participated in the legendary unofficial exhibition Confrontations (since 1984). During his school years, David expressed himself through neo-expressive painting, like his peers, with whom in 1987 he founded the group Hardheads. During this time, their work underwent transformation towards postmodern work with the image, its expressive and content, which were close to the Italian transavantgarde and the German Wild. The paintings of the Home series from this period, executed mostly using the linocut technique, incorporate the monochrome paintings visual signs of national, folk or decadent motifs that David uses with a dose of irony, referencing the sentiment of national identity, but also to a sense of his own connection to his homeland, which he cannot abandon. Jiří David is one of the outstanding Czech artists who in the 1980s in the eighties. In other In later periods, in addition to painting, David also worked in photography, object and installation. The connecting element of his work is the performative approach and engagement, in which the artist reveals in a critical way his own, as well as social identity. In his well-known photographic series Hidden Forms (1991-1995), he manipulated photographic portraits of well-known personalities or showed weeping politicians in a series of Without Compassion (2002). seventeen-meter neon heart for Václav Havel, placed on the Prague Castle in 2002. Jiří David graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (1982-1987). From 1995-2002 he worked as the head of the Visual Communication Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, and in 2004-2020 as head of the Intermedia Intermedia Communication at the UMPRUM in Prague. In 2015 he represented the installation Apotheosis the Czech Republic in the national pavilion at the Venice Biennale.