Václav Stratil, a personality of Czech contemporary art, his work ranges between drawing, painting, conceptual installation and performance. He questions the boundaries between reality and the roles we voluntarily or involuntarily take on.
He studied adult pedagogy at the Faculty of Arts of Palacký University in Olomouc. He has worked as a methodologist, teacher and night janitor, and it is this "parallel" life experience that has fundamentally shaped his artistic expression. He first exhibited in unofficial spaces and circles of the Olomouc underground scene. Gradually there was a visible shift towards conceptualism, when he began to develop his own language of minimalist ink drawings, often perceived as meditative or purifying acts in the cultural vacuum of normalized Czechoslovakia. He turns to the medium of photoperformance, in which he becomes his own object of investigation. Today, Stratil's work forms a distinctive bridge between post-conceptual tendencies and personal, existential gestures, in which humour, critical exaggeration and an emotional relationship to human fragility play an important role.
In a joint photograph by Miroslav Jiřele and Vladimír Novotný, we can see the work Pedagogical Note on Classes (2010), which is a distinctive commentary on the process of student assessment at art schools. Here Stratil reflects on the role of the teacher and the very act of classifying artistic work. He challenges traditional assessment systems that attempt to objectively assess subjective and often elusive aspects of artistic production. Through his work, he draws attention to the absurdity and paradox of trying to quantify artistic expression, which is inherently individual and multi-layered. In this way, Stratil not only criticizes but also inspires the search for new paths in art pedagogy that better reflect the complexity and subjectivity of artistic creation.
Václav Stratil, I Do Nothing and Other Works, 2015, Moravian Gallery, Brno
Václav Stratil has been connected with Telegraph before, for example, in the Signal IV exhibition, where it was possible to see his black and white photographs from the Religious Patient series, which included the selected works Nuda and Lžičky, from 1991. His solo exhibition Heart in Pincers had already played an important role, as it was the first ever exhibition to be held at the Telegraph Gallery in 2019. The exhibition featured drawing and photographic works from 2003-2019.
Václav Stratil, from the series Religious Patient, 1991 / at the exhibition Signal IV, Telegraph Gallery, Olomouc, 2019
Václav Stratil, Untitled (from the Habaděj set), 2003 / at the exhibition Heart in Tongs, Telegraph Gallery, Olomouc, 2019
