Rostislav Čuřík
(Photography)

The exhibited collection of analogue photographs by Rostislav Čuřík consists partly of early works made in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, and partly of recent works that the artist made this year specifically for the exhibition (Photography).

Throughout his career as a photographer, Rostislav Čuřík’s work has been characterized by artistic expression, experimentation, and performativity. A crucial starting point for him was mastering the extraordinary technique of analogue photography and its subtleties. His inspiration from avant-garde and modern photography is typical of his work, as well as long-exposure photography, and the fact that his images sometimes come into existence only in the darkroom, primarily through various interventions on the negatives, such as drawing, cutting, scratching, overlaying, exposure to light, inserting objects, painting with developer on sensitive paper and subsequent toning. Since he often manipulates the negatives in near darkness, his work walks the fine line between play and chance, informed by years of experience. Action and movement become an integral part of the creation of the works, and the artist himself also appears in a number of photographs.

However, most of them are not deliberately staged self-portraits, but rather a simple solution to the need to find a model for action photography. Rostislav Čuřík’s early work, created around 1980, represents – from today’s perspective – a clearly articulated testimony to the situation and feelings of a young creative generation coming of age during the era of limited possibilities under the “Normalization” period and a generally prevailing deep social depression. His work from that time, however, is brimming with energy and evokes “the explosion of a free supernova or the flash of a ball lightning,” as one of his contemporaries recently said when he learned of the upcoming exhibition at the House of Arts. Rostislav Čuřík’s photographs from that period still bear witness to the strength of a young generation that had the will and desire to realize their plans, yet inevitably clashed with the rigid totalitarian regime.

Rostislav Čuřík’s work is characterized by a romantic devotion to art and a blurring of the lines between everyday life and his creative practice. His early photographic work also includes staged images that stand out for their boldness in capturing artistically rendered nudes – often self-portraits – evoking the body-art movement prevalent at the time. The artist created this open, free expression of the body’s intimacy in studios on Táborská and Francouzská streets, in a house in Kamenná kolonie neighbourhood, and even outdoors. The studios captured in the photographs represented, at the time, rare havens of freedom, hidden from the outside world of the “Normalization.” There, Čuřík documented spontaneous, creative, and energy-filled revelries in which he engaged alongside his classmates-painters Laco Garaj, Libor Jaroš, with the circle of collaborators from the Tak Tak Theatre, led by director J. A. Pitínský (then still using his real name, Zdeněk Petrželka), or later with artists associated in the loose group Valerian’s Future, consisting of Michal Čuřík (Estrada), Roman Švandini, and the poet Jiří Dynka.

Formally, the character of Čuřík’s work has to do with the gradual rise of postmodernism in Czechoslovak culture at the time. In the sphere of contemporary Czech photography, his work is akin to that of the Slovak New Wave group, created by a generation of students (born around 1960) at Prague’s FAMU. However, unlike the artistic, staged and carefree, playful photography of the afore- mentioned artists, Čuřík’s images also contain an urgent, widely shared existential scepticism of the era.

The new series of photographs, Still Life on the Table, created specifically for the current exhibition and shot with a Linhof camera on 13×18 cm negative film using long exposures, also shows hints of performativity and artistic interventions using the photogram
method. These photographs capture magical arrangements of ordinary objects, mostly various packaging or waste materials, which the artist’s vision transforms into rare treasures. The images feature unique painting with light, the passage of time, and the beauty of the lived moment. Besides, their character reveals that the artist’s other artistic medium is painting. With this series of photographs, Rostislav Čuřík responds to his recent stay at Mikulov Chateau during a symposium dedicated to the phenomenon of alchemy in 2025. The exhibited collection of new photographs is complemented by images of mysterious still lifes from the so-called Cycle 2026 2nd Pinhole (A Minimalist Experiment). They were taken using several custom-made camera obscura devices, built by Rostislav Čuřík together with his brother Estrada. These are also on display at the exhibition (Photography), along with the artist’s calculations for their construction.

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