The Trickster from Prague The Trickster from Prague
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The famous repainted pink Soviet tank. photo: INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo
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The Trickster from Prague

Stach Szabłowski
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time 16 minutes

There are countries in the world where an artist like David Černý would have long been in prison—or worse. But in the Czech Republic, this creator with no respect for all that the nation holds sacred is celebrated as the country’s most famous contemporary sculptor.  

David Černý turned fifty years old a long time ago, but in many ways he is still a boy who refuses to grow up. His ego has expanded to a size unusual even for an artist; he’s recently started celebrating it at a museum devoted to his art which he himself founded. Good taste, subtlety, and political correctness are notions which Černý never adopted, because he has never even tried to become acquainted with them. In the 1990s he was the creative golden child of political transformation, and today he’s a relic of that era. The way his art develops is quantitative: Černý produces more work more quickly, and for more money, but in an artistic sense he’s standing still. There is an ongoing discussion whether he is even a good sculptor or rather a capable showman, someone akin to a rock star who fills the streets of Prague with his creations instead of playing the guitar. 

While tourists and the media adore Černý, the Czech creative scene turns its nose up at him. So far, the sculptor has been immune to criticism because he’s not an average artist but rather a phenomenon which cannot be disposed of with standard critical apparatus. One can enjoy or be irritated by his art, but they cannot dismiss it—largely because the Czech capital city has been intensely saturated by his works, and today it’s difficult to imagine Prague without Černý’s installations. In an essay in his book Zrób sobie raj (Do-it-Yourself Paradise), eminent connoisseur and devotee of Czech culture Mariusz Szczygieł claims that an artist like this could only have come about in the Czech Republic. At the same time, Černý works within a more universal narrative—he deals with the fate of post-Cold War art, the artistic and spiritual condition of post-Communist Central Europe, the unique opportunities and disappointed hopes of the era of transformation, and our parochial struggles with globalization, capitalism, and democracy. In this context, Černý is also a symptom of an era: if he didn’t exist, we would have to invent him. 

The Pink Tank 

At the end of 1989, when Czechoslovakia was gripped by the Velvet Revolution which brought about the end of real socialism in the country, David Černý was an art student. He was twenty-two, the perfect age to catch some wind in his sails, float towards success,

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Rinus Van de Velde

Rinus Van de Velde is a Belgian artist whose work spans a range of media, though he is best known for his large-scale narrative drawings. Each features a handwritten caption of one of his musings, which are often witty or existential in nature. While the charcoal drawings often depict him as a central figure, the majority of his colorful oil pastel works only insinuate a human presence.  

Though Van de Velde’s work reads as plein air, he has never been to the places in his drawings and instead imagines them from the confines of his studio. At times the works take the form of letters to other artists, and he is often in dialogue with the likes of Matisse, Monet, Hockney, and Doig. With his drawings, he has created a fantasy life for himself of the places he wishes to have seen and the life he wishes to have lived. The images presented here feature work from his most recent shows at Max Hetzler in Paris and Tim Van Laere in Rome.

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