“I never hold out in one place for too long. I’m impatient, always thinking about my art and studio. I am obsessed with painting. I see inspiration everywhere and in everything.”
Pavel Roučka
Pavel Roučka’s exhibition at the Museum Montanelli presents the established but constantly experimental work of a painter in his prime.
For his entire career, Roučka has preserved a strong and unceasing creative energy and an almost obsessive need to paint and create.
His art alternates between phases of ecstatic action art reflecting his impatient artistic urges and phases of a calm, almost aesthetic, abstract spiritual style.
The exhibition’s concept is based on an attempt at penetrating the mysteries of the inner impulses, at reaching the source of Roučka’s inspiration and discovering the hidden ascetic nature of his art, such as his sensitivity and respect for all that is simple, nature, spiritual, and symbolic.
Roučka finds inspiration all around him and addresses the most diverse range of subjects, in particular those springing from his inner dialogue. For his entire artistic career, he has regularly returned to earlier themes, which he is not afraid to reassess, though always in the spirit of the original visual style. He feels patience only deep inside his studio.
But one thing remains unchanged in Roučka’s oeuvre: He typically depicts a bent-over, imaginary, inimitable figure that seems to be either losing or just regaining its balance, or the figure is bowing or bent backward, huddled, standing on its head, kneeling, flying, on edge or with both feet on the ground or in the sky; a figure that is patiently experimenting with a new position. There are also loving figures, communicating figures, abstract figures or concrete figures awaiting answers that nobody will ever find, hear or see, for they are hidden deep within Pavel’s universe.
The exhibition is, in its own way, a multimedia exhibition, featuring objects from the museum’s collection as well as videos, documentaries, books, and published catalogues.
Dadja Altenburg-Kohl
Curator
