Jan Karpíšek
Škoda for the Indians (Pity for the Indians)
Brno, Czech Republic
Jan is a Czech contemporary painter. He was born in 1981 in Jihlava and grew up in the South Bohemian town of Třeboň. Between 1999 and 2005 Jan studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Brno University of Technology, where he also worked as a technical assistant. Jan work is characterized by topics such as, effluxion, the erotic, and, above all, spirituality. He is deeply concerned with meditation and a number of his paintings are records of perception of the body system and soul; however, his paintings show no formal unity. Jan's style sometimes evokes naivism or the grotesque, and at other times is similar to a gestic abstraction. Jan is also concerned with action painting and conceptual performance painting. He won the Prize of Dean 2003 for his bachelor work and in 2004, Jan was awarded second place in the students' competition Artkontakt. His work "Mars" was bought in the same year by the National Gallery in Prague and presented in IBCA 2005 in Prague. He is a member of the art group Svitava.
www.jankarpisek.cz
"I joined the Landfillart project because I'm highly aware of worse coming from the mass individual automobilist. The project caught me with the idea of recycling the parts of dead cars by creative people from all around the world. It shows the common intention of mankind for the good, not for the bad -- to bring the beauty and joy, not egoistic comfort, accidents with casualties and pollution. I made a picture on the disk of an old Škoda, brand of the traditional Czech vehicles and I named it "Škoda indiánů" which means "Škoda of the Indians" or literally "A pity for the Indians." It shows the red hunter maybe in pre-Columbian or let's say pre-Ford ages trying to shoot the deer, but have a look at his poor arrow... Anyway, the whole world there is always held by the Lord of Death, as in old Tibetan thangka paintings of Wheel of Life."Jan Karpíšek