Filip Turek

After one year of studying art history in Brno, he transferred to the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague where he studied in the studio of Aleš Veselý and was one of the first graduates of Milan Knížák’s intermedia school. I have come across a strange question in some secondary sources – why he is not as famous as his classmates and co-exhibitors from the 1990s (Markéta Othová, Kateřina Vincourová or Jiří Černický)? If this is actually true, a possible cause could be that not everyone has managed to absorb post-modernism areally and consistently, although it is already behind us, and the visual literacy of the audience has not intersected, with respect to time, with his language in spite of the fact that he uses solely the people’s language. Or, it is precisely for the reason that he uses the people’s language and it could be a confirmation of the subversive character of his work. In any case, he should be glad because it can be blinding to be on the scene in over-exposed light. But there is still time for evaluation concealed in glossy questions.

Gallery tranzitdisplay, with Tomáš Pospiszyl as curator, prepared the first complex overview of his work in 2008. It was basically a small retrospective from the past 20 years with a number of remakes of things from the 1990s that have not been preserved. The exhibition concisely copied Turek’s language and skilfulness of working with visuality and cultural signs. A representative example here can be his Chlapec s nůší hadů (Boy with a Basket of Snakes) (1999-2000). “This painting is partially a recycled product and partially a product of imagination. At its beginning there was a series of postcards Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, that originated about 15 to 20 years ago.”1 He intervened the positively stylized and generally well-known picture of a naively walking boy, by putting a basket with snakes on his back. He used humour to create the polarization of good and evil. In a way it is a simple Duchamp principle of painting a moustache on the face of Mona Lisa. He refers to Duchamp as a distant predecessor of postproduction not only in his ready-mades, but also literally in the titles of his exhibitions Shampoo and Duchampoo (Gallery Minikino, Ostrava, 2008). At the same time he elegantly takes us to a critical revision of the post-Normalization period. He brings historical probes in reprints of lifestyle magazines directly from the Normalization period at the beginning of the 1970s (Domov 72 [Home 72], 2000; Domov 70 [Home 70], 2001). He used another style in working with this period in his Modlitebna [Chapel] (1992, remake 2008). He used the principle of a home children’s swing and applied it to actual size church pews, on which he put sides with swinging roosters. He transferred the mumbling of prayer to the comforting swinging and he attacked the institutionalization of the church in a non-aggressive way. He went back to institutional criticism 14 years later and at the same time he undermined the expressiveness of language. He dressed stuffed animals in uniforms and called them Forest Police. His portrayal went as far as having the absurd image of squirrels with guns. The motive of protraction has appeared in his work several times. Last time it was in connection with the apparently endless row of coloured belts in which he paraphrased the text installation of Jenny Holzer in the Guggenheim Museum (Jenny Holzer ’89, Gallery etc., 2012; Chain of Peace, Ferdinand Baumann Gallery, 2012). He created his first endless belt in 1991 already, when he connected a group of fish shaped pocket knives – typical for the socialism period in Czechoslovakia.

The most frequent thought concept that we can observe in his work can be best illustrated on his work Sladké tajemství (Sweet Secret) (Gallery U Dobrého pastýře, 1996). He presents two sides of the coin – goodness with a warning. The sweet Milka chocolate turns into excrements; a nice boy has snakes in his basket. His work represents an unpleasant aspect of pointing out the fact that our brain has a tendency to force out negative things due to which it loses the ability to anticipate the consequences of mistakes, which he presents in every one of his works with gentle and somewhat bitter humour.

Performances and happenings:

1998

Luxování

Galerie JNJ, Praha

1997

Varování mladým umělcům

Přednáška, spojená s vlastní videoprodukcí.

Literární večer Radia 1 a Divusu. Klub Roxy, Praha

1996

Psem v Ostravě

Festival Malamut '96 (spolu s psovodem Petrem Pavlíkem)

1991

Růžový tank

Natírání tanku, Praha. Koncept: David Černý

Dožínky

Performance na festivalu MilanoPoesia, Milano, Itálie

Večer ohně (k výročí sebevraždy Jana Palacha)

Performance s instalací, hudební doprovod skupina Kosoř

(Martin Janíček, Ivan Vízner a IvanVosecký)

Akademie výtvarných umění, Praha

1990

Performance

Václavské náměstí, Praha (s Petrem Lysáčkem)

Internetové projekty:

Hovna online

animovaný gif, 1998. www.ecn.cz/turek/shitting.html

Umělec 1/2000, str. 46 - 51, Otto M. Urban: Anus et animus

Atelier 8/1997, str. 12, Milena Slavická: Mrtvé duše

Umělec 2/1997, str. 24, Simona Vladíková: Mrtvé duše

Atelier 6/1995, str. 3, Dr. Pavel Petřík: Pokračování kauzy

Turek versus Chalupecký

Atelier 2/1995, str. 7, Radek Váňa: Turek versus Chalupecký

Táňa Demčáková: referát o výstavě v galerii MXM,

AVU Praha, 15. 12. 1994

Lidové noviny, 24.11.1994, str. 11, Lenka Lindaurová:

Nudná postmoderní čítanka

Výtvarné umění 2-3/1993, str. 59 -62,

Ludvík Hlaváček: Filip Turek

Playboy 1/1991, str. 17, Milan Knížák představuje vybrané umělce

Živel 13/1999, obraz Maják z cyklu

O cenu J. Chalupeckého

Detail 8/1998, str. 8, Žena vyloučená z našeho světa

(reakce na recenzi výstavy Cindy Sherman od J. Chuchmy

v časopise Respekt)

Umělec 6-7/1997, str. 4, umělci sobě, z projektu

Josef Sudek Revisited

on-line verze celého projektu

Detail 8/1996, str. 8-9, o projektu Sladké tajemství

Divus 3/1996, str. 13 - 29, Z dějin Umění

- ze sbírky Filipa Turka, MXMIV

on-line verze celého projektu

Divus 1/1995, str. 15 - 18, kresby a básně

Phill Tucker: O cenu J. Chalupeckého

Vydal: Divus, Praha, 1994, u příležitosti výstavy v galerii MXM

on-line verze

Výtvarné umění 1/1992, str. 62 - 63, odpovědi na

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