Radka Částková and Magdalena Šimurdová
Michal Kříž (*1982) studied graphics and painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts (FaVU) in Brno. During the studies, he did not excel in anything; and because of taciturn nature and constantly bitter look (which usually appears in men at the end of their career), Michal was not very popular. Some of his classmates ignored him, while others simply overlooked him. After the studies, his independent artistic outcomes (exhibited mainly in regional galleries of local importance) were usually met with similar response. Later, Michal started working in one of the public cultural institutions as a nameless and expendable official, managing a kind of boring and never-ending agenda related to exhibition operations. In the world of “high” art abounded with exceptional artistic personalities and noble ideas, he gradually lost the last shreds of illusions about pursuing an artistic career. Moreover, all hidden and insidious rules of such career path, including the limits of creation itself (especially of his own), came to light.
Despite this in 2017, Michal started consistently drawing the diary entries in which, using the most primitive artistic means, he comments on the stereotyping and purposelessness of his everyday life. In the randomly captured reflections, imbued with the humor of a terminal patient, he carelessly constructs the autobiography devoid of any facts, reflecting the fragmented and illusory nature of his own personality that includes inherent alienation, irrelevant anxiety, disorientation, loneliness, hypertrophied libido and other common traits of men in midlife. The driving force behind urging him to create and act is often th awareness that the meaning and significance of creative efforts is, not only in his case, rather wishful thinking than an objective reality. Therefore, he usually reaches for paper and pencil merely in moments when he has nothing to say, breaking the line between the high and the low, between the extraordinary and the mundane, proud of his near madness, as if he had reached a longed-for goal. However, what would previously stood only as a piece in a low humor magazine has become (fortunately for Michal) a legitimate contemporary art today. After all, artists such as Dan Perjovschi or David Shrigley have already walked this trodden path before him.
Michal Kříž (*1982) studied graphics in the studio of Margita Titlová-Ylovsky and later painting with Luďek Rathouský and Jiří Franta at the FaVU in Brno. In his artistic ventures, he most often chooses the drawing as the basic artistic means and the simplest way of expression. Since 2017, he has been using the Instagram to present his work too.
Pavel Švec (*1980) studied in the intermedia studio of Václav Stratil at the FaVU in Brno between 2002 and 2008. Since 2009, he has worked as a producer, collection administrator and curator in Prague galleries, where he produced many exhibition projects in collaboration with contemporary artists (Jiří Švestka Gallery, SVIT, Hunt Kastner, Nevan Contempo, Galerie 35m2 and others).