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Fantastic Realism 1960 - 1966. Jan Jedlička – Vladivoj Kotyza – Mikuláš Rachlík

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2013

Abstract

The text presents the work of three artists from the sixties, Jan Jedlička, Vladivoj Kotyza and Mikuláš Rachlík, who met at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1961 - 1968. They headed to the fantastic and grotesque painting.

They found the black humor and invisible brutality in the everyday life. Their paintings and drawings were strange grotesque image of Czechoslovak socialist dystopia.

Fantastic realism was an alternative to the then increasingly popular structural abstraction and constructive geometry. In 1966, the painters confronted their work in an unpublicized show in a vacant apartment in the Lesser Town in Prague.

The tragic events of 1968 and the invasion of the USSR into Czechoslovakia parted ways the three actors of the exhibition.