Theodor Pištěk (artist)

Theodor Pištěk mastered classic realistic oil painting while studying under then prominent portrait painter professor Vratislav Nechleba. For his graduation painting, Boxer, his studies were extended to include an honours year. At the end of the 1950s he worked on portrait painting, but surprisingly his subsequent paintings did not draw on his training at the Academy, instead anticipating a Constructivist element in his art, to which he periodically returned in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and after 1990 in his three-dimensional installations. In 1960–1961 he created geometrical relief compositions in plaster as positive and negative diptychs (In and Out, 1960; Reverse, 1961).

In the early 1960s he was in close contact with Zbyněk Sekal, whose studio was next door. They influenced one another when creating material paintings, and their work was based on similar feelings about life. It was at this time that Pištěk made a series of relief assemblages from automobile components (Synagogue, 1962; Crucifixion, 1963) and Art Informel reliefs from dismantled car radiators (Notes from a Missing Person, 1963; Execution, 1964). He also made his first three-dimensional installation, The Ten Commandments (1964).

As a counterpart to his material relief paintings, Theodor Pištěk painted airy black and white compositions in ink and nitrocellulose lacquer that combined simple geometrical forms with structures he had observed in the organic world. They are also his response to post-surrealist symbolism, something a fellow student from the Academy, Jaroslav Vožniak, was working on at this time. The subjects of these paintings were sometimes light-hearted (How to Play Ball, 1966) and sometimes fraught (How to Escape, 1965; Trap, 1965; Unsuccessful Attempt, 1966).

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  Reverse, 1961
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  Fly, butterfly, fly! , 1962, Zlatá Husa Gallery
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  Synagogue, 1962, Zlatá Husa Gallery
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  Notes from a Missing Person, 1963
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  Unsuccessful Attempt 2, 1966

Following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Pištěk's drawings resembled targets with bullet holes, and their composition was accented by the use of monochromatic blocks of colour (August Picture I–III, 1968–1969). His series of drawings in ink and nitrocellulose lacquer continued until the beginning of the 1970s (View Inside, 1970; Half-Life, 1970) and was followed by coloured compositions of geometrical forms (Reflection, 1971) and small-format oil paintings in which the geometrical order of blocks of colour was broken by small irregularities (Fall, 1973; House, 1973). He returned to monochrome paintings in ink and nitrocellulose lacquer in the early 1980s in compositions of artificial architecture (Where I Will Live Next, 1982), which later became three-dimensional labyrinths (City, 1997).

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  August Picture I, 1968
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  August Picture II, 1968
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  August Picture III (1969)
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  August Picture IV (1969)
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  Where I Will Live Next, House of Art, Brno, 2019

At the height of communist repression during the normalization era, Pištěk's work featured wrapped figures and objects that served as abstract existential symbols. Fingers emerging from the wrappings indicate that these are not statues inside (Family Portrait, 1976; The Nude Maja, 1980). The motif of a wrapped head (Self-Portrait by the Window I-II, 1981) is in itself terrifying, and the emptiness or ornateness of the background makes this symbol of cruelty even more disturbing.[9] Also from this time is a cycle of illusionistic paintings in which crumpled fabric or paper bound with twine veils a hidden reality that can be glimpsed in places where the fabric or paper has been ripped. Usually the opening reveals an endless blue sky with little clouds, but the painting Czech Horizon (1979) shows only black earth under a dark sky. In the triptych Farewell to Youth (1981) Theodor Pištěk symbolically bid his racing career goodbye.

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  Family Portrait, 1976, Museum Kampa
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  Self-Portrait by the Window I, 1981
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  Self-Portrait by the Window II, 1981
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  Czech Horizon, 1979
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  Farewell to Youth, 1981, installation, National Gallery in Prague

Pištěk applied his mastery of trompe-l'œil to a series of paintings of gleaming automobile and motorcycle parts (Angelus, 1978; Gold Fever, 1978) or the impersonal objects that surround us (Tonca Still Life, 1981; Homage to Papin, 1981). Photography provided inspiration.[10] This faithful hyperrealist depicting of the surface of things was not just an aesthetic phenomenon, but also a way for Pištěk to measure himself against other painters. Ultimately he came to resist his categorisation as a photorealist painter, instead describing his program as “Neo-Romanticism”. He did not want viewers to see only verism, illusion and perfection in his work, but to offset the modern cult of ugliness and hopelessness with a “new professionalism” that sought through flawless painting to evoke an atmosphere or recall a moment or story from the past that we had begun to doubt ever really happened.[11]

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  Angelus, 1978
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  Passion 2, 1978
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  Tonca Still Life, 1981, GMA Hradec Králové
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  Homage to Papin, 1981, GA Karlovy Vary
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  Still Life with Lamps, 1987

Pištěk's paintings from this period guide the viewer from sensory enchantment to seeking the mystery behind a painting. They were influenced by the film world in which he operated, and like film backdrops they created fictitious settings and brought new impulses into Czech modern art. Various disconnected narratives intersect (The Price of Elegance, 1973–1974; Landscape with a Honda, 1977), and the illusion of reality is constantly undermined by the painter's interventions. The minutely detailed and technically flawless illusionistic painting served to deceive the viewer's senses. A seemingly torn canvas is in fact intact (Ecce Homo, 1983); a collage with photographs glued on and scraps of paper held by drawing pins is only a fiction in a painting (Portrait of a Friend, 1976; Midget, 1977; D Day, H Hour, 1980). Paintings include references to other artists (Dalí in Self-Portrait; Millet in Angelus) and entirely personal messages such as digital numerals showing Pištěk's date of birth in an apparently torn canvas he created for his fiftieth birthday (From My Life, 1982).[12]

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  Big Landscape, 1976, AJG Hluboká
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  Portrait of a Friend, 1976, AJG Hluboká
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  Landscape with a Honda, 1977, AJG Hluboká
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  From Life, 1977
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  Midget, 1977

Pištěk has repeatedly returned to Biblical themes. His Joseph wears overalls and is depicted sitting on a wooden plank as he rolls a cigarette. This scene of Joseph in his carpentry workshop is rendered as a torn poster that seems to have been tacked to a second picture plane showing a sports car; several nails have fallen out of the poster. The corner of the picture of the car has also been ripped off to reveal the background: a blue sky with a little cloud (Joseph N, 1978). Ecce Homo (1983) shows a racing driver in a balaclava as a modern paraphrasing of the Man of Sorrows. The cross has been replaced with an exploded view of an engine in the background, Christ's wounds are symbolised by illusionistic cuts painted over the driver's hands, and the canvas looks as if it has been slashed in reference to the scourging of Christ. The Last Supper (1983) cycle of paintings, a number of variations on a vacant table in front of a window with a view of an empty landscape, presents another of Pištěk's themes: a dead, empty space devoid of people, which creates tension by referring to a familiar narrative to which nothing more can be added.[13]

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  Josef N., 1978
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  Ecce Homo, 1983
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  The Last Supper, installation at the National Gallery in Prague, 2012
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  Silent Landscape, 1984, National Gallery in Prague
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  Adieu, Guy Moll (1992-2017)

Since the turn of the 1980s and 90s Pištěk's paintings have included architecture that recalls film sets (Variations on a Given Theme 1–3, 1989). In the mid-90s Theodor Pištěk returned to geometrical abstraction in his paintings of empty and stylised architecture, where he worked with various kinds of false perspectives and lighting (Variations 1–6, 1995–1996; Building 1–2, 1995; Down 1–2, 1996; Column, 1997). The illusion produced in two dimensions is both magnified and contradicted by the impression of a tangible mass emerging from the picture plane and simultaneously guided along lines into the depth of the painting, where it surprisingly loses its shadow and the concrete becomes abstract.[14] “My work moves in spirals, always beginning with the details and gradually freeing itself from them. The image becomes empty and is simplified to the minimum.”[15]

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  Party with Plečnik, 1992-1993
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  Variation No. 1, 1995
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  Construction No. 1, 1995
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  For Little Caroline, 1997-2019

Pištěk's contemplative Conversations with Hawking (2005–2019) are fragile geometrical constructions that delineate areas of black space interwoven with spot heights and marks indicating the motion of heavenly bodies.[16]

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  Conversations with Hawking 1b, 2005-2006
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  Conversations with Hawking, 2012
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  Conversations with Hawking II, 2017
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  Conversations with Hawking, 2018
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  Conversations with Hawking III, 2019

Besides his film work, for which Theodor Pištěk has received the highest honours, his painting is also highly valued. In 2013 his painting A Visit to the Harrachs (1979) was auctioned for CZK 3,240,000, while in 2016 Seagull Flying into a Dream (1984) was auctioned for CZK 2,900,000. His painting Adieu, Guy Moll (1992-2017) became the most expensive artwork by a living Czech artist ever sold at auction (CZK 21,200,000).[17]

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  Bart Simpson, 2003
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  Red Head, 2019
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  Mínotaurus, 2019

Pištěk's conceptual installation of sacred objects in the former riding school in Hluboká nad Vltavou had a dramatic gradation and scope, and within the context of postmodern scepticism it offered an updating of the psychological values of collectively valid myths.[18] On an altar in the foreground, which he titled Homage to Böcklin’s “Centaur Watching Fish”,[19] he placed the scoop of an excavator arching over a fish in a glass sphere. At the head of the riding school he installed an altar painting with an illusionistic landscape in the Baroque style, to which he added brightly coloured geometrical forms that quoted the American postmodernist Frank Stella. In front of this painting was a pyramid with a pile of refuse that was titled Reliquary. The side altars, hidden in a labyrinth, depicted the Crucifixion as the hanging chassis of a racing car and the Visitation made of an old petrol pump, with car doors as the angel's wings. According to Jiří Šetlík, Pištěk's subjective interpretation of our sick world unmasks our faith in consumerist idols.[20]

Pištěk's three-dimensional objects for his exhibition at the Prague City Gallery (1999) worked with the contrast between image and sound. Garden was a pavilion made of massive children's building blocks surrounded by a forest of hanging poles protecting the pavilion's privacy, with a soundtrack of whispered conversations too quiet to be heard. Next to Garden was Forest, a glass pyramid filled with fragments of wood and rubbish from fly tipping, together with romantic forest still lifes and a soundtrack of chainsaws and falling trees.[21] Other objects relate to Pištěk's film work and his racing career. At the entrance to his retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery in Prague he installed his labyrinthine City and behind it a large glass box with a pile of film costumes, while in the middle of the exhibition space was a racing car. His conceptual diorama The End of the Forest was an artificial forest made of suspended poles through which visitors could look at a painted landscape covering the entire wall (Trade Fair Palace, National Gallery in Prague, 2012). This stepping out of the picture plane into the third dimension is an agenda that Pištěk had earlier described in the introduction to a catalogue as “Neo-Romanticism”.[22]

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  Centaurus Watching the Fish, AJG Hluboká, 1993
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  Reliquary, AJG Hluboká, 1993
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  Garden, Prague City Gallery, 1999
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  National Gallery in Prague, 2012
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  The End of Forest, National Gallery in Prague 2012
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  City Labyrinth, National Gallery in Prague, 2012
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  Film costumes, National Gallery in Prague, 2012

• 1990 uniforms, banners and insignia for the Prague Castle Guard

Pištěk has worked on 111 films with many Czech and Slovak directors, including Oldřich Lipský, Jiří Menzel, Jiří Krejčík, Juraj Herz; as well as with many others, including Janusz Majewski, Bob Hoskins and Jerzy Skolimowski. Some of his works:

• The White Dove (1959), directed by František Vláčil (costumes and set design)
• Markéta Lazarová (1967 ), directed by František Vláčil (costumes)
• The Valley of the Bees (1967), directed by František Vláčil (costumes)
• Amadeus (1984), directed by Miloš Forman
• Valmont (1989), directed by Miloš Forman
• The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), directed by Miloš Forman

• Arabela (1979)
• Mr Tau (1980)
• The Visitors (1982)
• Dune (1998)
• Children of Dune (2000)

• Miss Julie (1972), Divadlo na Zábradlí, directed by Jiří Krejčík
• The Queen of Spades (1972), Smetanovo divadlo
• Don Giovanni (2006), National Theatre in Prague

• Dracula (1994), directed by Jozef Bednárik
• Rusalka (1998), directed by Jozef Bednárik
• The Count of Monte Christo (1999), directed by Jozef Bednárik

• National Gallery in Prague
• Moravian Gallery in Brno
• Museum Kampa
• Regional galleries in the Czech Republic
• Galleria Arturo Schwarz, Milano
• Galerie Schüppenhauer, Cologne
• Galerie Volkmann, Münster
• Private collections home and abroad

• 2012/2013 Theodor Pištěk: Ecce Homo, National Gallery in Prague

• 2019/2020 Theodor Pištěk: Angelus, House of Arts in Brno

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  White 2
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  Labyrinth
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  Pyramid

• Helena Musilová (ed.), Theodor Pištěk: Ecce homo, 168 s., Národní galerie v Praze 2012, ISBN 978-80-7035-508-4
• Jiří Šetlík, Jana Brabcová (ed.), Theodor Pištěk, 388 s., Galerie Pecka Praha 2007, ISBN 978-80-904008-0-1
• Jiří Šetlík, Theodor Pištěk, 24 s., Galerie hlavního města Prahy 1999, ISBN 80-7010-054-0
• Jindřich Chalupecký a kol., Theodor Pištěk, 140 s., Alšova jihočeská galerie v Hluboké nad Vltavou, Galerie hlavního města Prahy 1993
• Martin Dostál (ed.), Theodor Pištěk - Angelus, 168 s., Dům umění města Brna, KANT 2019, ISBN 978-80-7437-297-1

• Pavlína Doubravová, Hyperrealistické tendence v tvorbě Theodora Pištěka, bakalářská práce, FF a UDU JČU v Českých Budějovicích, 2012 On line

• Theodor Pištěk, 1978, Macourek Miloš, kat. 12 s., SČVU Praha
• Theodor Pištěk: Obrazy, kresby, film, 1982, Kotalík Jiří Tomáš, kat. 20 s., SČVU Praha
• Theodor Pištěk, 1984, Neumann Ivan, kat. 32 s., Galerie umění Karlovy Vary
• Theodor Pištěk: Obrazy, 1988, Janoušek Ivo, kat. 16 s., Ústřední kulturní dům železničářů, Praha
• Theodor Pištěk: Hluboká 93 - 94, 1995, Šetlík Jiří, kat. 48 s., AJG Hluboká nad Vltavou
• Theodor Pištěk, 2006, Machalický Jiří, kat. 10 s., Galerie Montanelli Praha
• 3x Theodor Pištěk, 2007, Machalický Jiří, Mládková Meda, kat. 20 s., Museum Kampa – Nadace Jana a Medy Mládkových, Praha
• Šedesátá, ed. Magdalena Juříková, Galerie Zlatá husa, Praha 2004, ISBN 80-239-3406-6, s. 308-313

• Fascinace skutečností - hyperrealismus v české malbě / Fascination with relity - Hyperrealism in Czech painting, Muzeum umění Olomouc 2017, ISBN 9788088103219
• Příliš mnoho zubů / Too Many Teeth, Musilová Helena (ed.), kat. 147 s., Retro Gallery Praha, Praha 2017, ISBN 978-80-905877-8-6
• Postava k otvírání / The figure examined, Nováčková Zuzana, Štefančíková Alica, Svoboda Petr, kat. 132 s., Galerie Benedikta Rejta, Louny, Galerie výtvarného umění v Mostě, 2016
• Před obrazem, Dospěl Milan a kol., kat. 158 s., Galerie Kodl, Praha 2015, ISBN 978-80-200-2542-5
• Stavy mysli: Za obrazem / States of Mind: Beyond the Soubor: Stálá expozice GASK, David Bartoň a kol., kat. 208 s., Galerie Středočeského kraje (GASK), Kutná Hora 2014, ISBN 978-80-7056-185-0
• České moderní a současné umění 1890 – 2010: 2. díl, Dolanská Karolína a kol., kat. 189 s., Národní galerie v Praze 2010, ISBN 978-80-7035-447-6
• Šedesátá / The sixties ze sbírky Galerie Zlatá husa, Juříková Magdalena, Železný Vladimír, kat. 414 s., Galerie Zlatá husa, Praha 2004, ISBN 80-239-3406-6
• Hyperrealismus, Beran Zdeněk, Vítková Martina, kat. 31 s., Západočeská galerie v Plzni 2002, ISBN 80-85025-29-9
• Současná minulost: Česká postmoderní moderna 1960–2000, Tetiva Vlastimil, kat. 176 s., Alšova jihočeská galerie v Hluboké nad Vltavou 2000, ISBN 80-85857-37-5
• Umění zrychleného času: Česká výtvarná scéna 1958–1968, Alena Potůčková (ed.), kat. 147 s., České muzeum výtvarných umění, Praha 1999
• Umění zastaveného času / Art when time stood still: Česká výtvarná scéna 1969–1985, Alena Potůčková (ed.), kat. 268 s., České muzeum výtvarných umění, Praha 1996
• Skutečnost an iluze: Tendence českého radikálního realismu, Tetiva Vlastimil, 169 s., Alšova jihočeská galerie v Hluboké nad Vltavou 1993
• Forum '88, Hlaváček Josef, Kříž Jan, Nešlehová Mahulena, Petrová Eva, Šetlík Jiří, Wittlich Petr, kat. 96 s., neoficiální výstava v Pražské tržnici 1988
• Netvořice ´81, Hlaváček Josef, Kříž Jan, Šetlík Jiří, katalog neoficiální výstavní akce u Bedřich Dlouhého v Netvořicích 1981
• Czech stage costumes / Le costume tchèque de théâtre, Marešová Šimáčková Sylva, Bubeník Květoslav, Vejražka Vítězslav, Divadelní ústav, Praha 1972