Jan Šafránek | Café Kubišta
03/02/23–11/06/23

The exhibition presents a cross-section of the work of a native of Hradec Králové, a painter and world traveler who transformed his fascination with the visible world and its absurdist poetry into an inimitable painterly celebration of human society. Through key works from various decades (from the 1960s to the present day) – further complemented by an extensive set of drawings – visitors to the exhibition can follow the gradual crystallization of the artist’s visual poetry.

Jan Šafránek’s first attempts at painting involved the creation of minor variations on modernist landscapes and copies of famous portrait paintings possessing a strong psychological accent. Soon, however, he turned his attention to depicting “unreal real” situations – genre scenes filled with peculiar figures born out of the artist’s fantasy, nourished by the strange reality of the worlds of theater, dance, and pub culture. Šafránek arranges his various scenes into a modern burlesque travesty populated by figures observed not just on the street or in bars and pubs but also at Party meetings and police stations (Smoothly Shaved, Well-Coiffed / Hladce oholen, dobře ostříhán, 1975; Pub Games / Hospodské hry, 1972; The Speaker / Řečník, 1978). His paintings create the illusion of a movie whose plot has been condensed into a single frame, a humorous comic novel in which any similarities between the depicted individuals and real people is “purely coincidental.”

In his sophisticatedly naive multi-figure compositions, Šafránek allows a series of unrelated microstories to unfold. As in life, here too there is no unifying center. The profane and the sacred, the everyday and the unusual, the real and the unreal are combined in an incredible visual celebration, a carnival of colors.

The exhibition was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the Statutory City of Hradec Králové.