ABSTRACTION AND FIGURATION

FROM THE 1960S ONWARD, THE CZECHOSLOVAK ARTIST MIKULÁŠ MEDEK DEVELOPED A POWERFUL VISUAL LANGUAGE THAT HOVERED BETWEEN ABSTRACTION, INFORMEL, AND SYMBOLICALLY CHARGED PAINTING – ONE SHAPED AS MUCH BY HIS SPIRITUAL QUEST AS BY THE SOCIAL UPHEAVALS OF HIS TIME.

Two large-scale works from this creative high point, dating to 1963 and 1973, feature in our sale.

Medek seized the brief cultural opening in the ČSSR to break free from the official artistic doctrines of the socialist era. His distinctive surface technique – layers of dense pigment, incised lines, and relief-like textures – creates almost tactile pictorial spaces. The resulting compositions evoke organic forms, mechanical apparatuses, and fragmented bodies, each acting as a coded system of intense visual presence. These are key works by a tragically short-lived artist who refused to be co-opted by any establishment.

JEAN
DUBUFFET

Also represented is another maverick of 20th-century art: Jean Dubuffet. His 1982 Art Brut composition can be read as a radical repudiation of academic and orthodox art conventions. Raw yet poetic, full of irony, subversion, and unconventional beauty, his works often incorporate materials such as tar, sand, earth, or ash – deliberately turning away from the polished material aesthetics of classical Modernism.

Dubuffet was fascinated by the art of society’s outsiders and eccentrics, valuing their work as an unfiltered, authentic expression of human creativity. He particularly admired the Swiss artist Louis Soutter, whose ink drawing ‘Perles vives’ will be offered in this same auction. Though Dubuffet and Soutter never met, they were united in their shared pursuit of an unadulterated artistic voice.