Pavel Hayek

After several years, when he presented his work within group exhibitions, Pavel Hayek has returned with an individual exhibition hosted by the Kvalitář Gallery.
The exhibition will focus on Pavel Hayek’s painting to which he started devoting intensively in the early 1990s. At that time, he abandoned graphic work, moving towards more monumental painting canvases, characterized by a content variety.

Nature is the motive which we frequently come across in his work. In the past, he often chose a particular kind of fruit, spice, tree or plant. He then transferred the fragments of these natural shapes onto the canvases of his paintings, thus producing composed structures. The aim was to point out the fact that the world is full of individual and distinctive shapes which are never identical. Throughout his life, Hayek has like to notice what surrounds us on the daily basis but to what we have forgotten to pay special attention.

However, in the eponymous exhibition, Hayek will present a different aspect of his work. It is his current fascination with textiles. The canvases no longer feature images inspired by nature but we can see squares or dots decorating the applied textile materials. These are particular tissues crumpled by the artist, photographed and then transferred to the canvas. The textile, purchased in a shop, has a simple and regular geometric pattern distorted and broken by crumpling and creasing. This results in surprising and irregular distortions of the regular structures controlled by the element of coincidence and improvisation. The topic thus always contains the tissue even though the tissue material has been abstracted in the same manner as the abstraction of the images of particular leaves, roots, fruits, and trees. The perception of the structure factuality in Hayek’s paintings remains the same.

The exhibition will be complemented with older work featuring tree structures, which have been found in Pavel Hayek’s work since the second half of the 1990s. a strong impulse for creating tree structures consisted in magnifying the paintings of roots up to the form or trees. “I take a photo of certain parts of the view of the treetop. Sometimes, i slightly interfere with the composition and transfer it onto the canvas,” says the author of his technique.

In the exhibition, large-format black and white structures, so typical of his work, will be complemented with a distinctive red colour of the paintings inspired by the textiles. No only through this, Pavel Hayek shows us how skilfully he is able to disrupt the established order, replacing it with a new one.

In his paintings, Pavel Hayek (1959, Brno) focuses on everyday life around us and the nature as a whole. He has exhibited in Germany and Austria, as well as repeatedly in the leading art galleries in the Czech Republic. This year, he participated in the Art Fair festival in Paris.