Igor Korpaczewski

 

KW + Q (*b. 1959) is one of the most distinctive painters and among the most prominent figurative artists on the Czech art scene of the past thirty years. Looking at the long list of his exhibition activities—beginning with the renowned Svárov Konfrontace exhibitions (1988, 1989)—it becomes clear that his work was consistently included in key curatorial projects throughout the 1990s and beyond (e.g. Umění postmoderny, 1992; To, co zbývá, 1993; Zkušební provoz, 1995; Snížený rozpočet, 1998; Na volné téma, 2000; ARTNOW.CZ, 2003; Perfect Tense / Malba dnes, 2003–04; Resetting / Jiné cesty k věcnosti, 2007–08), many of which are hard to imagine without his participation.

Throughout the decade following the Velvet Revolution, he was one of the few artists who worked consistently within the medium of painting while also being regularly presented in public. This is due, among other things, to the fact that KW always respected the painting as an autonomous medium, while at the same time remaining open to its postmodern transformations, which opened up a free space for working not only with painting itself, but above all with rethinking an emancipated visuality as such. Already at that time—within the newly emerging discourse in our context associated with the rise of so-called new media—he was able, within his generation, to defend painting by reflecting on it without seeking its abolition. He broke through the academic status of painting both through material and installation-based experiments and through a reassessment of its “representation.” —text by P. Vaňous