Title: Jaroslav Valečka
Description: Jaroslav Valečka, born 1972, is a representative of stuckism. Stuckism is a radical and controversial art group that was co-founded in 1999 by Charles Thomson and Billy Childish (who left in 2001) along with eleven other artists. The name was derived by Thomson from an insult to Childish from his ex-girlfriend, Brit artist Tracey Emin, who had told him that his art was 'Stuck'. Stuckists are pro-contemporary figurative painting with ideas and anti-conceptual art, mainly because of its lack of concepts. Stuckists have regularly demonstrated dressed as clowns against the Turner Prize. Several Stuckist Manifestos have been issued. One of them Remodernism inaugurates a renewal of spiritual values for art, culture and society to replace the emptiness of current Postmodernism. The web site www.stuckism.com, started by Ella Guru, has disseminated these ideas, and in five years Stuckism has grown to an international art movement with over 187 groups in 45 countries. These groups are independent and self-directed. "In a certain sense, the world of Western European and American culture is still in the dark about what happened to art 'after Communism'. I mean what happened to art not only in Russia itself, but also in the nations of Eastern Europe that had been satellites of the Soviet Union. In theory there should have been an immediate liberation, with artists suddenly set free to do what they pleased and produce what they pleased. In practice, this seems not to have been the case. Jaroslav Valečka is in quite a number of ways a typical product of the post-Communist situation in his native country, the Czech Republic. This in many ways amounts to saying that his work is not 'typical' of anything at all, but is sui generis, an entirely individual product of his own talent". - Edward Lucie-Smith.
Subjects: Czech Painting, Stuckism (Art movement)
People: Jaroslav Valečka (1972-)