Tomáš Císařovský: Bukovac's Virgin

A painter’s mannequin listening to Allen Ginsberg or playing with the Čapek brothers, depicted as a figure in a painting by František Kupka, a companion to Vítězslav Nezval or Jiří Kolář, but also as Salome holding the head of her creator – the painter himself. Tomáš Císařovský has acquired a capable muse for his latest series, an eternal and immortal one, in fact, for she was never alive in the first place. Císařovský discovered her in his former studio in Prague’s Dejvice district, which at the beginning of the last century was used by Vlaho Bukovac, a painter and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts. Císařovský has given this almost 1500-year-old nameless mannequin its own life, letting it enter intimately into his works. In no other cycle of paintings has he combined his enduring interest in historical events and figures with a thorough examination of all that is human and inhuman within man and himself.