Ivan Pinkava

Ivan Pinkava (1961). The work of one of the most distinctive personalities of contemporary Czech and world photography is characterised by technical precision, formal reduction and simple pictorial composition, which carries space for expressive sophistication. The artist’s well-thought-out studio productions often speak of the inexorability of the passage of time, of uncertainty or transience, and often arouse a sense of unease in the viewer. The photographs, for which Pinkava chooses a hermetically sealed space, draw on archetypal human stories. Throughout his art, he works with traditional iconography, with the themes of vanitas or memento mori, whose traditional meanings he alters, updates or empties, thanks to which he creates a very unique visual language reflecting his specific way of thinking. Pinkava’s work is intertwined with the basic questions of the meaning of existence – the course of human life, its vulnerability, precariousness and subsequent confrontation with death. Fascinated by the process of extinction, however, he does not perceive finitude negatively, but rather as the beginning of something new, unknown, which transcends the boundaries of our knowledge. The artist’s work is represented in many private collections and galleries in the Czech Republic and abroad (e.g. Victoria & Albert Museum, London; National Gallery Prague; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; Museum of Fine Arts of Houston), his name was included, among other things, in the German encyclopedia of world photographers Das Lexikon der Fotografen 1900 bis Heute.