Painter and graphic artist Václav Boštík is one of the most distinct representatives of the lyrical stream of Czech post-war abstraction. From the outset his artistic path aimed for a meditative-minimalistic expression, for which a philosophical and theological starting point was always important. Boštík’s path often focused on archaic cultures and old European art, in which he saw an alternative to the fragmentation of modern civilization. Boštík always sought a universal, transpersonal order, a unity of man with nature and God, a path to the world of primordial experience. Over the course of his creative life he increasingly strove for greater objectivity and the suppression of the individual, leading to a painting in which he, in his own words, avoided “descriptive subservience, expressive deformation, and subjective misuse” and gradually limited himself to “objective colour surfaces, basic geometric shapes and clusters of points in simple geometrical relations (Rippling, 1967; Curvation, 1970).
In the early years of his career in the late 1930s, Boštík rejected inspiration from popular art trends of the day and, together with sculptor and painter Jan Křížek, began to take an interest mainly in Egyptian and Mesopotamian art, the creation of natural nations (Imaginary Head, 1946) and metaphysical paintings and also drew from early Romanesque art. The subjects of his works often came from Christian iconography (Drawing on the Apocolypse, 1945; Heavenly Jerusalem, 1989); an interest in Josef Šíma is evident in the dematerialization of paint and the work with the internal light of colour planes in a series of paintings from the early 1940s (Cube, Rock, Matter, Division). Upon the invitation of Josef Kaplický and Karel Šourek, Boštík joined Art Forum (Umělecké besedy); following the rejection of his cycle of gesturally drawn, essentially abstract landscapes that constituted a second line of Boštík’s work at the time, he distanced himself from the Forum’s views (Lyrical Landscape, 1942).
Boštík’s first solo exhibition in the Aleš Hall of the Art Forum in 1957 marked one of the first signals of post-war abstract painting and contributed to the renewal of continuity of Czech modern art. Throughout practically the entire latter half of the 1950s Boštík worked with Jiří John on a memorial to victims of the Holocaust in Prague’s Pinkas Synagogue, a work that could in its horizontal division foreshadow some of its later canvases (Creasing, 1973). In the 1950s Boštík created a series of sign-symbol paintings (Night, 1957, Figurative Composition, 1957; Rhythm, 1958), but abandoned this concept at the end of the decade in favour of grids and colour fields that he then developed for several decades. Before the mid 1960s Boštík worked his way to paintings that were practically monochrome, in which he expressed his own idea of a cosmogonic process, of energetic fields in the stage before geometric organization (Blue Field, 1964; Pink Nebula, 1965). Light appears in these pictures merely as a transparent, immaterial principle. In the 1980s and 90s he continued to develop these principles, above all in series of finely ground pastels.
“If I were to characterize my endeavours, then I’d say that I’m looking for a lost paradise”. I try to find the way out of the labyrinth in which we live and to get close enough to paradise to at least catch a glimpse of something.”
