Von Birgit Ziegler.
Von Birgit Ziegler.
A portrait of the Czech artist Jiří Skála, who was taking part in the artist-in-residence programme of the Museumsquartier in Vienna 2005.
"I'm a painter", Jiří Skála always tells people who ask him about his profession, "but once they have seen my work, nobody believes me any more", the artist reveals with a grin.
Skála had just finished cooking his tortellini when I visited him in the guest studio in Vienna's Museumsquartier – designed by Heimo Zobernig – to conduct an interview. Red scarf, red pullover, red sauce on the tortellini and, standing on the floor in a corner, paint pots with red lids. Eight of them are neatly arranged in two rows in front of prepared canvas that is waiting to be stretched on the wooden frames also standing there. Everything else (the entire space) is white. The paint in the pots is also white, I am assured. No sign of painting, and it doesn't even smell of paint.
Jiří Skála (who was born in 1976) is a young artist from the Czech Republic. He was born in the small town of Sušice into a family that was not particularly interested in politics with the exception of a grandfather, who listened to the "Voice of America" on the radio. Skála was only 13 years old at the time of the major political transformation in his country and therefore still too young to have experienced it consciously. Today it is clear that everything changed with the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Skála is grateful for the changes and exploits the opportunity to spend time abroad. In Prague he studied from 1998 onwards at the Academy of Fine Arts, firstly under Jiří David (studio for visual communication) and then under Vladimír Skrepl (studio for painting). In 2002 post-graduate studies took him to the Palais de Tokio in Paris.
Jiří Skála's art is what is called "interdisciplinary". He takes a strongly analytical approach, tending towards theatre and performance, and has a preference for projections and the cinema. He likes to be meticulous and he would not be a Czech if he did not have a strong sense of black humour. This cryptic wit is what makes his work less severe than it might seem at first glance.
For example one of his works (Measuring of Volume, 2002) consists of four rectangular boxes. "Im summer 2001“, says the artist, "in my family's garden I filled a tub with water in order to measure the volume of each member of the family. My sister, my mother and my father sat one after the other in the lukewarm water. Naturally the water level rose. I measured the difference in level, which, according to the principle of Archimedes, corresponds with the volume of the body." Jiří Skála then designed rectangular boxes to match his measurements, whereby the largest one represents his mother. "She is 'the greatest' in the family, in every respect", the artist laughs.
Alongside object art Skála's disciplines include video photography, installations, text, typography and painting but he hardly ever employs the latter, as has already been said. Communication is particularly important to this artist and for an understanding of his work. "How do people within the European art scene exchange experiences" is a question Skála repeatedly asks. In "Take it Personally“ (2004), for example, the focus is on the art scene in Prague. Each individual artist who took part in the exhibition chose a well-known person from the scene that they could not stand and wrote in large letters on the wall: " I don't like this person called …" Naturally, the person who had written the text also signed it. This action not only reflects the art scene but "it views art as a starting point for communication and applies it in a focussed way", says Jiří Skála.
During a stay in Paris together with nine artists from six different countries he created a huge, internationally well-known game ("00, an exhibition, which grows out of the middle“, 2002). "The basis for this work was the game Scrabble", recounts Skála. "We made an improvised version of it and placed the pieces across an area of 200 square metres. The rules were changed. You could use several different languages and make words of unlimited length. In the end we used 40,000 pieces for the installation". The production group PAS, which Jiří Skála belongs to since 2000, along with Tomas Vanek und Vít Havránek, also works in a very communicative and experimental way.
"Video Trip“ (2002) is a work by this group that should be understood as an unusual tourist excursion. PAS invited a video artist to visit Prague and to plan a very personal tour of the city. The product was presented to a travel agency. Together with the agency the tour was then offered to exhibition visitors at the Royal College of Art in London. A video of the action was also planned. "Unfortunately, so far nobody has booked this trip", says Jiří Skála, "but we are still in touch with the travel agency and can carry out the project whenever required."
Vít Havránek, a fellow member of PAS and curator of tranzit.cz (the international platform for contemporary art in Central Europe) recommended Jiří Skála as Artist in Residence in the Vienna Museumsquartier. Skála will work there until the end of 2005 on the further development of his project "Local Stigma“ (2004). This video installation combines elements of performance, video and painting. Four artists each prepare a canvas to make a work on it. While engaged in this activity they are filmed from above. One sees the very different ways in which a canvas can be primed. In the exhibition the individual films are projected on the respective canvases. In this way the picture is created.
For Jiří Skála projecting onto a canvas and painting on one represents the same thing. "In both cases, whether painting or video, what you think, what you feel and what you select appears on the canvas/screen", says the artist. For him both activities are painting.