Vladimír Skrepl

Painter and creator of objects Vladimír Skrepl, born on September 15, 1955 in Jihlava, occupies a significant position on the Czech contemporary art scene. Skrepl’s intellectually-spontaneous painting has since the mid 1980s divided audiences into staunch supporters and skeptical opponents. Extraordinary is his role head of the Painting II studio at the Fine Arts Academy in Prague which he joined in 1994. His long-term assistant has been the conceptually-inclined Jiří Kovanda which means the studio has a much wider focus whose complexity has made it one of the most popular art schools. Vladimír Skepl who between 1976 and 1981 studied the history of art at the Philosophical Faculty of Masaryk Universioty in Brno and for the next ten years worked as a curator at Prague City Gallery, is one of the most significant authors who articulated the start and transformation of the post-modern discourse in painting in Bohemia since the mid 1980s. Skrepl’s work developed from unrestrained paintings through quotations and a specific geometry to his own concept of abstract and abstracted and fragmentally subjective and figurative painting in the 1990s with a marked expressive line. In recent years, his work focuses on concise expressivity characterized by layers of paint, unrestrained figuration and the exploitation of script and inscriptions and an all-encompassing tendency which has expanded to his ingenuous objects. If anyone in Bohemia should be aligned with the term Bad Painting, it would be Vladimír Skrepl. His distinctive work convincingly links his exceptional insight into the tendencies on the international art scene with an original invention and a remarkable drive. Besides a series of exhibitions, the Skrepl’s work was also recognized in 2007 by the Jiří Kovanda Award for artists over the age or 35.

Martin Dostál

Mikulov Art Symposium 2011

July 16th - Agust 13th, 2011

• Theoretician of the Year
• Photostory
• Catalogue (pdf)