Stratil Václav *1950

Untitled, 1978

oil on canvas, author's moulding, 70 × 65 cm, signed bottom right HU HABA 78
The offered early painting by Václav Stratil from 1978 was made in the period when its author belonged to the circle of unofficial artistic visual and musical community in Olomouc. Under the pseudonym HU HABA, Stratil painted expressive existential works, different from his other works. From his early figurative Christian-influenced paintings primarily influenced by Rousseautian expressive abbreviations, he moved on in the second half of the 1970s to a more abstracted and reduced position and to complete abstraction. The works from this period consist mainly of grey colour palette and are often covered with thick hatching of expressive lines. After moving to Prague in the early 1980s 1920s, Stratil created a well-known series of large-scale black drawings, created by a dense network of pen-and-ink lines, rethinking the previous work on a more contemplative and processual level.