Tomáš Švéda - Eyes of the Landscape

27.5.2022 - 2.10.2022

Tomáš Švéda / Eyes of the Landscape

27. 5. – 2. 10. 2022, the opening will take place on 26. 5. 2022 at 5 PM.

At the opening of the exhibition, Duo Melos and students from Lenka Pašková's flute class and students from Jan Mareš's guitar class from the F.L. Gassmann Elementary Art School in Most will perform.

The Regional Museum and Gallery in Most presents in its gallery spaces an exhibition of paintings by Tomáš Švéda, who was one of the founding members of the association 12/15. He was born on December 12, 1947, in Prague and after attending the Secondary Vocational School in Prague, he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (studio of Prof. Alois Fišárek). He is engaged in painting, drawing, and restoration. He lives and works in Prague and in Malíkov near Nežárka.

The artistic generation of the 1970s, to which Tomáš Švéda belongs, decided at the beginning of their independent creative journey to re-examine the possibilities of traditional artistic media – painting, drawing, sculpture. They did so with great expertise, and today it shows that it was precisely they who preserved the awareness of the necessity of creative artistic freedom in our environment and significantly contributed to the return of Czech visual art to the context of European artistic events.

Tomáš Švéda actively participated in the founding of the generational Free Association 12/15, Late but Nevertheless, which brought together a substantial part of the most prominent members of the generation. From the beginning, his work moved between drawing, painting, and object, among which defined boundaries blurred and disciplines freely intertwined. The inspiration of Švéda's work, primarily from nature, is evident. In his work, nature-landscape appears primarily as a determining force of flowing life. It does not reveal itself as a forever given static fact, but emerges only as a dynamic relationship in harmony and opposition, as a dialogue between man and all that is created. Švéda's paintings, as well as his drawings and large, space-levitating colored objects made of wire and paper, are energetic fields, temporal segments of a journey, where the artist touches the never-ending variable discourse of the power of nature through drawing or painting. This unstoppable variability of natural events perfectly corresponds to the fragile volatility of the brushstroke or colored pencil. They capture the nodes of the flow of space and the force curves of its expansion.

The main building element of Tomáš Švéda's paintings and drawings is light, which is color. This is even more emphasized by the work created after the transfer of the artist's studio to South Bohemia. As a painter, he saw color in a completely new way here, even more demonstratively carried by light as a creator, multiplied by the tremor of the high sky on the surface of the waters. Tomáš Švéda does not want to capture the final shape of things and phenomena in his painting because he consciously does not take a single position as a creator "in front of the model," from which a perspective view of things arranged in three dimensions of everyday lived space would arise. His position as an observer is, in fact, multiple; he sees as one who is constantly in the center, surrounded by light, space, and time. Where the painter stands, everything transforms; there energy flits and changes its visible forms. In this process, he can look into the eyes of the landscape and hear the discourse about the meaning of reality. The situation of a person who finds themselves in the midst of the event of space and time can thus well characterize all of Švéda's work so far, where each new step simultaneously uncovers the meaningful layers of past steps.

Exhibition author: Ivan Neumann

Exhibition curator: Olga Kubelková

Photography: Ota Palán

Graphic design: Marek Jodas

The Regional Museum and Gallery in Most, Čsl. armády 1360/35, Most

Open daily except Monday from 12:00 to 18:00, Sat – Sun from 10:00 to 18:00

Admission: 30 CZK full (adults) / 15 CZK reduced (students and seniors)