Jiří Petrbok

Jiří Petrbok (1962) is one of the absolute classics of the Czech art scene. Since the mid-1990s, he has been systematically working with the phenomenon of man. He understands it as an element and a certain criterion on which his paintings are based and which determines them. Petrbok exposes the human body to suffering, deformities and various forms of discomfort. Although man, especially the human body, is at the centre of most of Petrbok’s works, we often get the feeling that he has been deliberately excluded from the painting. A remarkable element of Petrbok’s work is his capacity for irony and a certain grotesqueness. Petrbok is very often able to set the plot in a situation that shifts things from the imaginary zone of a certain horror and anxiety and creates the author’s distinctive and unmistakable language, which is a careful and extraordinary synthesis of many years of creative experience.  Jiří Petrbok is the head of the drawing studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.