LUMIR HLADIK

EXHIBITS

Lumír Hladík is a post WWII neo-avant-garde artist, a pioneering figure of the 70s East European conceptual and performance art movement. Fascinated by its immediacy and formal freedom, he engaged in action art, installations and interventions, along with similar-minded artists; Karel Miler, Petr Štembera, Jan Mlčoch and Jiří Kovanda. He has adopted a very distinctive form of body art, described by art historian Pavlína Morganová as arranging “derailed situations”. His early work explored the notions of alterity, mortality and determinism.

After moving to Canada in 1982, the artist spent over three decades studying natural entropy in the Canadian wilderness. His current “derailed installations”, an eclectic mix of retro-curia, baroque exuberance and sleek urban glitz-kitsch exploits a wide spectrum of objects; vintage ready-mades, repurposed industrial paraphernalia, animal fur, textiles, and plexiglass in a variety of disciplines; sculpture, drawing, video, photography and sound. Hladík’s bio-interventions, an inter-species collaborative work that incorporates destructive marks of wild black bears and other Canadian wildlife, are exploring notions of historical and cultural amnesia.

By the means of cross-pollination of a wide range of contentious themes and contexts; history, biology, pop culture, quantum physics, philosophy or religion, Hladík is synthesizing a frenzied alchemy of multilayered innuendos, riddled with ambiguity and myriads of subtle, yet perturbing references. He claims that his art responds to today’s society’s ubiquitously ridiculous “rational” defence of its own irrationality.

2016-2023 exhibit overview

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