Tomáš Hlavina belongs to the generation of artists that arrived on the Czech art scene during the 1990s. From the very start he was a leading light of this generation and his work was selected for many group exhibitions (e.g. he participated at what was an important exhibition in its day, Trial Operation, at the Mánes Gallery, and also exhibited at Zvon ’94, Biennale of Young Artists at Prague City Library, and at exhibitions of the then leading Prague gallery, MXM).
The starting point of his work can be traced back to several important Czech artists of the 1960s. This is typical of many of his contemporaries, e.g. the Tvrdohlaví group, who did not feel an affinity with their immediate predecessors. It was also the result of the influence of new post-revolutionary professors at the Academy of Fine Arts, the list of whom includes many imposing older names. In Hlavina’s work we can see the influence of Stanislav Kolíbal (and his minimalistic approach) and Milan Knížák, who operates on the principle that there is no everyday item that cannot be part of an artwork. The 1990s generation also rediscovered the charm of Duchamp’s satirical ready-mades, a fact that is very apparent in Hlavina’s work.
However, from the start Hlavina reinterpreted the work of his much older colleagues in a very personal way. And so, for instance, his objects are ready-mades only on first sight. “I don’t make pure ready-mades,” the artist himself says. When we examine his individual objects closely, we find they are composed of many different elements, which may be found or bought. In addition, Hlavina often then goes on to modify them by drilling, polishing, flexing, splitting or painting them. The object loses its original concrete form and the result is a refined artefact that has, for instance, a broom at both ends, with a drilled handle and the title Flute. The titles are important: the fact that they do not relate to the original items from which the object is made creates new meanings.
His objects also lack Duchamp’s sharp social satire. In Hlavina’s work everything is refined, sophisticated and aesthetically cultivated. Another feature of his work is the fact it is not coloured. This results in very minimalistic works that project metaphorical content. This fact distinguishes his work from the classical minimalistic objects of the 1960s (one is reminded of the well known statement by Frank Stella: “What you see is what you see”). Hlavina is a master at putting banal, often very utilitarian, items into new contexts, in which the subjects of reality lose their original meaning and are transposed into new contiguities that became a sensitive, poetic metaphor. Hlavina is a poet who expresses himself in objects rather than verse, a poet of subtle, unobtrusive poetry in which a light humour plays with the everyday world, so aestheticising his references to minimalism, conceptualism and Dadaism.
