Jiří Marek

Bio

Jiří Marek (*1991, Brno) belongs to the promising authors of the emerging generation of painters born in the early 1990s. Jiří Marek explores memory, time, and the fragility of interpersonal relationships in his paintings. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he first studied in Jiří Sopko's painting studio and then in Jiří Petrbok's drawing studio.

His painting poetics is introspective, subliminally deep and melancholic. It presents the extended floor plan of interpersonal relations as a kind of "hallucination", as a "fragmented world" that needs to be patiently reassembled, defragmented, reanimated and purified. Similarly, he perceives the cultural legacy of the past, which must be transformed into a new sense of the present. Everything seems to consist of a slow motion, which only makes it possible to observe and capture the ongoing internal transformation of the author, with which he works and which lends distinctive painterly features. Concentration on "breaking through the temporal planes of experience" also contains the cleansing catharsis of spiritual exercises. They are painting exercises whose task is to clarify and purify the relationship to history and the past as living examples of today. Something seemingly archaic is radicalized here in order to undermine the certainty of the so-called developmentally surpassed, and to make human destiny present again in its recurring nudity, vulnerability and Heideggerian thrownness.