Stanislav Diviš - The Die is Cast!
19 Feb. 2010 – 6 July 2010
Stanislav Diviš (born in 1953) is one of the major representatives of Czech fine arts of the 1980s generation. He did not finish his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague though. In the mid-1980s his art was simply not acceptable to the official socialistic school. However, he became more significantly involved in the unofficial work and presentation of another (unpermitted, basically forbidden) art. In 1987 he was the key personality in establishing the today already legendary Tvrdohlaví fine arts group. The year 1988 should also be remembered as when he finished the picture Milking Instructions, actually the manifesto of the Scientific Realism fine arts school, which is the author’s personal contribution to the history of fine arts. Since 1989, besides developing his own work, he has also been engaged in teaching activities; between 1994 and 1996 he worked as a lecturer in the Current Trends Studio of Jiří David at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague; since 2003 he has been leading the Painting Studio at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague.
The Die is Cast exhibition is not retrospective in the proper sense of the word like, for instance, Diviš's exhibition in the East Bohemian Gallery in Pardubice. There were several reasons.
In particular, we were led by the effort to present, in a very representative way, Diviš's work from the past several years. This is however an ambiguous task. Those who know Diviš's work understand that one of the basic elements in it is the creation of extensive and, due to his manner of interpretation and expression, very cohesive cycles. On the other hand, it is indisputable that the author repeatedly returns in his work to subjects that seem to have already been „resolved“. In other words, one of the objectives of the Die is Cast exhibition is „to compare” the work dating back to the 1980s and 1990s with the cycles similar in the subject being created in this decade (Remnants, Spartakiads, etc.). But this is not all.
For instance, Buffoons, the first and absolutely essential cycle created by Diviš between 1984 and 1985 (in a certain sense it was a response to the then very topical expressive tendency initiated by the German Neue Wilde and the Italian transavantgarde), established certain rules and procedures of work to which he later returned, although for totally different reasons, in the cycle of pictures inspired by the paintings of his little son (Two Worlds). And we could go on and on. The cycles of pictures inspired by mythology and Christianity from the period between 1986 and 1987 appeal today, when the artist is starting to produce similar subjects, though influenced by 25 years of his own work.
As regards the concept of the exhibition as such, we opted for a narrower selection of extensive cycles rather than for a „factographic” document of the entire existing work. For the first time ever, for instance, Buffoons are presented in a very respectable way; emphasis is placed on the cycles of 12 collections, Formation and Disappearance of the Cyclone and Spartakiads. Of course, we are also reminded of some of the other crucial subjects, which however more complete the overall picture of the artist's work.
