“The visual language of Pavel Příkaský’s work is a multifaceted play with human corporeality, kept in the spirit of posthumanist tendencies. In the motif of fauna and flora, the artist seeks to blur the boundaries between biological life and mythical beings and the symbolism associated with them. The delicate painterly gesture, executed with sparse, diluted paint, oscillates between the abstraction of pigment structures and the rhetoric of figuration – his work can be compared to contemporary genetic dystopias as well as to imaginative games known from surrealism and, even earlier, from Art Nouveau.”

Viktor Čech, excerpt from the text accompanying the exhibition “Mucilago,” Gočárova galerie, Pardubice

Pavel Příkaský (*1985) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 2012, from the painting studio of Vladimír Kokolia. Over the past years, his work has undergone a marked transformation. A painter whose practice has always balanced on the edge of abstraction and figuration, he has increasingly approached painting as an open surface into and out of which distinct spatial elements enter. From a certain point on, his canvases began to transcend the two-dimensional plane, becoming reliefs and, in places, sculpturally malleable objects. This shift was significantly influenced by his collaboration with conceptual and video artist Miroslava Večeřová (since 2016). In dialogue with her video installations, Příkaský’s paintings started to absorb strategies that allow them to “step out” into space – through light wall paintings extending motifs from the canvas onto surrounding walls, through coloured fringes and gel-like clusters. The fringes form dense streams or braids of colour cascading from the canvases to the floor or covering their surfaces like a curtain one can peer behind. Although these elements interweave with abstract and figurative motifs, the work is fundamentally grounded in figurative drawing, often based on zoomorphic forms. Animals appear as if lost in a haze, hovering between dream and memory, while recurring transformations between human and animal lend the paintings a melancholic, symbolic dimension. Positioned between abstraction and figuration, neither purely painting nor sculpture, Příkaský’s works articulate a distinctly personal language that mirrors the ambivalence and uncertainty of our contemporary world.