Štech Adam *1980

Portrait of a girl (Jitka), 2014

oil on canvas, 200 × 150 cm, signed. bottom right A Š 14
Painting or sculptural portraiture is one of the favourite subjects of Adam Štech, a prominent representative of contemporary Czech neo-modern painting of the middle generation. Through it he conducts a dialogue or confrontation with various historical modernist styles based on abstraction, transformation, deformation and deconstruction of the motif depicted. The portrait represents a classical painting genre that has been a part of fine art practically since its beginnings. In the past it fulfilled various functions. Its representative role or the importance of preserving the likeness of the person depicted was replaced in the nineteenth century by photography. In the modernism of the first half of the twentieth century, the portrait, alongside the still life, became a means not of capturing a faithful copy of the subject, but of working with a cubizing or abstracting morphology that created new meanings and revealed rather hidden and outwardly invisible contents and contexts. Štech's portraits are based on quotations of various types of pictorial modernist models, depicting the sitter sitting on a chair or portraits from a semi-profile. He depicts in them contemporary, but also historical personalities - politicians, painters, but also close people whose portrait features are legible in the paintings, yet also ironically deformed and transformed. His approach, however, does not involve a postmodern distance and a casual play with mixing various cultural models, but rather a conceptual work with rearranging meanings, their disorientation and intermingling of different temporal planes. Adam Štech (1980) studied painting in the studios of Jiří Sopek and Vladimír Skrepl at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague from 2001-2008. In 2004 he won the Jiří Sopek Studio Award and in 2011 he was awarded the Critics' Prize for Young Painting.