Václav Stratil

Václav Stratil (1950) appeared at the Olomouc art scene during the 1970s. His physically demanding delineated ink drawings of the 1980s represented the first highlight of his career. In the following decade, he turned his attention to photo performances (a term he coined for self-portrait photos taken at a local photo lab) in which he discovered the crucial theme of his own identity, and to paintings in which he used plastic tablecloths, wallpapers and color stickers instead of paints. In the first decade of the new millennium, Václav Stratil occupied himself predominantly with painting but in recent years, he worked with a great variety of expressions. Despite some external eccentric signs, his inner inclination aims at unity. He abandoned his earlier strategic multiplication of his identities in favour of more paths leading to a single, complex horizon in a productive syncretism based on the conviction that just like the author himself, art has also reached a stage of weakening obligations towards the society and towards itself and has become a field for unlimited surveys of personal fascinations openly admitting the need of succinct communication. In his subjects and rendering of his paintings and drawings, Václav Stratil highlights his own maturity (old age), the right to play, and sentimental emotions. He explores the area of low forms of visual expression whose visual codes are widely comprehensible.

Václav Stratil’s most important independent exhibitions include his “serial exhibit” of the 1990s. His project entitled Stray Dog in Prague’s Rudolfinum followed up on his earlier delineated ink drawings but the new pieces were animal portraits of rather intimate character. At Joint Exhibition in Nová síň in Prague (1997), Stratil exhibited black and white photocopies of paintings by Václav Boštík. His exhibition Czech Landscape, again at Rudolfinum, was conceived as a subjective photographic “map” of the author’s personal and professional life. In 2000, the Museum of Modern Art in Olomouc held a retrospective of his work. An overview of Stratil’s photographic work was presented at an exhibition at Centre national de la photographie in Paris (2002). A large exhibition entitled Country is not Death in the Dům pánů z Kunštátu gallery in Brno consisted exclusively of paintings with the subject of the fox, the author’s key motif in this period. In the autumn of 2011, some of the paintings Václav Stratil created in Mikulov included in the exhibit entitled Golden Collection at Prague’s Jelení gallery. In 2005, the transit.cz initiative published an overview of his photographic work entitled I’m History (an English version of the book was put out a year later by the JPR Ringier publishing firm. He heads the intermedia studio at the Fine Arts Faculty of Brno University of Technology. In 2010, he received the Award From Lukáš Jasanský and Martin Polák, a prize awarded by young artists, curators and art critics to their colleagues who served as their inspiration.

 

 

Mikulov Art Symposium 2011

July 16th - Agust 13th, 2011

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