Martin Kolář *1999

2015-2019: Secondary School of Applied Arts in Ústí nad Orlicí

2019-2023: Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (studio of drawing, Jiří Petrbok)

2023-(2025): Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (studio of drawing, Alice Nikitinová, Matěj Smetana)

Martin Kolář (1999) is one of the most prominent painters of the youngest artistic generation. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he studied in the studio of Jiří Petrbok and Martin Gerboc, and subsequently with Alice Nikitinová and Matěj Smetana. The author creates a contrast and tension between a deliberately sweet, smooth form and content with elements of emptiness, nihilism and militancy. Already during his studies, he attracted attention with his controversial style, when, for example, in one painting, a human skull with a decapitated unicorn head is seen next to a toddler in a military uniform nursing from a breast cut off with a saw. In an allusion to Friedrich Nietzsche, Kolář depicts the descent into madness as a consequence of the search for deeper truths, which, however, run into the inner limits of the human mind and can even end in one's own self-destruction. The Freudian principles of destructive Thanatos and promiscuous Eros, where the atomic bomb is also a phallic symbol, oscillate like a wave of alternating electric current. He works with pop culture and subculture quotes, while ingeniously operating with the aesthetics of strangeness and ugliness, uncertainty and a sense of unease. Kitsch and decadence, color and pain, ornament and symbol – following the example of Jacques Derrida, Kolář deconstructs reality and pays attention to death and mourning (“le deuil”) with a morose, but all the more true motto: “death is not outside of life, beyond its border, but is inscribed into it from within”. Despite the presence of feelings of disillusionment and misanthropy, the paintings paradoxically seem cheerful and playful, which further elevates their bizarreness.

- Kamil Princ