Adam Kašpar

Adam Kašpar (1993) is one of the most distinctive personalities of contemporary Czech realistic painting. Due to his great talent for capturing the atmosphere of untouched nature, deep and primeval forests, he is often associated with the doyens of Czech landscape painting, especially Julius Mařák. However, the interior of the forest is not the artist’s only theme. In his work, he deals with the ancient origin of nature as well as its demise. He is fascinated by the life of the landscape as a complex phenomenon and is interested not only in the existence of plants, but also in the existence of ‘inanimate’, inorganic natural materials such as rocks, stones, or, in the latest cycle, space objects. Already during his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, he attracted the attention of a number of collectors and curators, not only because of his unflagging interest in landscapes, which led him from deep forests through Mongolian wastelands to Icelandic glaciers, but especially for his conceptual, almost scientific approach to work. For his creative process, he needs not only painting and drawing tools, but also contemporary techniques that function as extensions of the human eye: for example, a camera, a telescope to observe distant celestial bodies, or a microscope to examine rocks. If we look into the painter’s sketchbooks, they are teeming with notes on the sedimentation of rocks, excerpts from geological textbooks, maps, ideas of what the landscape looked like before human intervention, or even his own experiences of being in nature. Unlike the romantic landscape paintings of the 19th century, Kašpar’s works show almost archaeological research into the life of planet Earth, and his plein air paintings are often more an exploration of nature’s archives than an attempt to capture a specific individual scene. In the choice of Kašpar’s themes, the landscape that avoids any hint of human existence resonates strongly. In the current era of climate crisis, this phenomenon could be thought of as an idyllic effort to return to before the emergence of civilisation. However, if one delves deeper into Kašpar’s work, one will also find paintings of the North Bohemian Basin or other places deeply affected by human existence, even though they may not look like it at first glance. Rather than as pre-human, we should perceive the artist’s work as post-human and understanding, and thus accentuating, the age of the Anthropocene as a philosophical phenomenon (geochronologically it is not yet possible to confirm it with certainty). Although he is often referred to as a realistic painter, he often paints in spite of reality and composes the landscape from several different points of view in order to accentuate a certain geopolitical problem, or he transforms it into the form it would look like without human intervention, or rather, on the contrary, several decades or hundreds of years after the natural recovery from human activities. His works are represented in important Czech and foreign collections of contemporary art and have been presented at a number of very interesting and important exhibitions. Among others, for example, the exhibition The Light within a Picture: Czech Impressionism, organized in 2017 at the Prague Castle Riding School, where they hung alongside artists such as Antonín Slavíček, Max Švabinský, as well as Eugène-Louis Boudin and Claude Monet.