Lukáš Slavický
(*1996) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (Studio of Painting I / Robert Šalanda and Lukáš Machalický School). Slavický works with painting, video, and object. Each medium represents a distinct language and a different way of thinking. Their intersection becomes a method for reflecting on the image from multiple perspectives. He is interested in how shared visual language and cultural memory shape our sense of belonging and identity. Slavický collects and transforms archival sources, translating them into images that oscillate between history, recollection, and the unconscious. The process demands a constant state of exploration, allowing space for discovery, error, and the unexpected. He is the winner of the Critics’ Prize for Young Painting for the year 2024 and recently presented his works at the Miroslav Kubík Gallery (2025), Czech Center Paris (2024) or Galerie SPZ (2022).
Education
2015-2021: Master of Arts (MA) in Visual Arts, Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (Robert Šalanda, Lukáš Machalický, Jiří Lindovský, Dalibor Smutný)
2011-2015: Secondary Art School and College of Václav Hollar
Award/Residency
2025: CZ/BE Symposium in Miroslav Kubík Gallery, Litomyšl
2025: Residency in the Netherlands (HKU, Utrecht)
2024: Winner of the 17th Critics’ Prize for Young Painting in Czech Republic
2024: Honorable mention in the experimental film section, festival Mladá Kamera
2021: Studio Award, Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, Painting Studio 1
Solo Exhibitions
2024 Absence of an Image Interpreter, Okraje Gallery, Tábor
2022 The Bell, Uncle, for Whom Does it Toll? + guest Adam Líška, SPZ Gallery, Prague
Group Exhibitions
2025 One Strike To Heaven, Miroslav Kubík Gallery, Litomyšl
2025 On the Roof by the Chimney, Nová síň Gallery, Prague
2024 Art Grand Slam: Inside Movement, Czech Center Paris, France
2023 Subtle Synergy, Vzlet Culture Hub, Prague
2023 Knock Knock: Exposition of Self-Help Archiving, POP-UP Gallery AVU, Prague
2022 18 FPS, Jan Čejka Gallery, Prague
Heritage
2025, Painting
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Inheritance series reflects on human origin and the shared ground of existence. Rather than following a direct narrative, it is a process of searching – a layering of memory, images, and materials. The works explore what is common yet often inexpressible: traces of connection, inheritance and belonging. Childhood appears here as a source of vision – a state of perception in which the image carries more weight than words or defined meaning. Memory is not bound to specific events, it carries universal strata of human experience that resurface through form and texture. It is a contemplation of kinship and the diversity of humankind, evoking a sense of a larger, interconnected whole.
Generations, 200 x 290 cm, oil on canvas, 2025
As the source material for the portraits, I generated and merged faces from old found photographs, selecting those that appeared archetypal or somehow representative. In this way, I felt I was not violating anyone’s personal memory, but rather tracing a shared human image. In the process of painting, I added one layer after another, then applied glazes, sanded the surface, and layered again – as if gradually adding stratums of time. The initial inspiration for the work came from Fiona Tan’s video Facing Forward (1999), which reflects on a series of colonial era footage examining the gaze, identity, and the politics of representation. A syntetic aportrait of memory – fragmentary and nonlinear. A constellation of figures of diferrent race, origin and age. A fictional group portrait of ancestors, a dream archive. The image functions as an artefact, rather a hallucination then a document of the past. Depicted figures are not specific individuals but representatives: imprints of collective identities, iheritied patterns, subtle gestures. They are bearers of fundamental human experience: work, play, modes of survival and cultural tradition. Human family as a constelation of bodies, traces, echoes…
blac k night
160 x 120 cm
mixed media on wooden board
2025
Absence of an Image Interpreter
2024, Series
In the series ‘Absence of the Image Interpreter’, I question the dominant role of language in perceiving visual art. Instead, I encourage a fresh gaze – one that resists the instinctive urge to categorise, generalise or explain what is seen. I do not wish to listen, but to see the grass grow. My method lies in the layering of plans and intentions, forming a dense mixture from which, at times, reality may briefly flash through. Painting becomes an indirect transmission from a repository of unknown visions and images travelling through the human unconscious across time. Here, I avoid depicting personal emotional states, instead, I focus on an attempt to capture the universal beauty of reality. Through observation, I seek understanding and heightened sensitivity – both towards the surrounding world and towards the obscure messages emerging from the subconscious.
Absence of an Image Interpreter, Okraje Gallery, Tábor, 2024
The exhibition was kindly offered to me by Okraje Gallery as part of the prize for winning the 2024 Critics’ Award for Young Painting in the Czech Republic.
Unseen Displayed
2022 – 2023, Series
Uncovering both the physical and mental processes and depicting the background phenomena connected with the preparation and creation of a work, aims to capture something abstract – an attempt to imprint into time and space the mental construct and the act of manual work itself. The painting is not only what is visible, but also a trace of thought and decision.
Back from the Woods
The still life depicts the mental and working processes, where the boundaries between preparation and result dissolves. The placement of the objects follows the lines of the rule of thirds and the golden ratio. The framing was made from an old bed – some of the remaining beams happened, by chance, to match the exact dimensions of the painting. The imperfect joinery, in the spirit of DIY craftsmanship, and found materials from the forest evoke the quiet atmosphere of a cottage. One mushroom does not make a mushroom dish.
In the Picture
Instead of the painting as an illusory window into the world – a means of transporting us to another time or space – this work offers an insight into the medium of painting itself and its formal structures.
Painting styles and tools intermingle: brushstrokes, pure colour fields, stains, textures. The grid represents window panes, but also functions as a visual element, a tool for transferring sketches, and an autonomous formal motif. It imposes order on chaos, bringing contrast to the tangle of colours and forms. By translating this grid into three-dimensional space and extracting it from the pictorial plane, the work extends the idea of exposing the unseen processes and forces beneath the surface.
The Bell, Uncle, for Whom Does It Toll?, SPZ Gallery, Prague, 2022
+ guest: Adam Líška
Bored, you absentmindedly turn the cubes and watch a burning tree outside the window. They can be arranged into pictures, but also in other ways. Those more experienced among them went to take a closer look at the fire. This space is a kind of room. And notice the doors. Good doors. They’re even nice. But there’s no doorknob. You’ve been building a picture from dominoes for hours, almost finished, and you’re happy with it. Suddenly, someone barges in, ruins your construction, and scolds you for playing on the floor. You feel like crying, get up, and hit your head on the table, causing a knife to fall and cut your finger off. There’s half an hour transition into an active day, and the first step is to start working. It also works the other way around, if you want to intentionally demotivate yourself and do nothing, for example.’
For the exhibition, I painted hand-carved wooden cubes: six paintings in one seemed like a practical choice for a small space. The idea behind the installation came from our gloomy thoughts stemming from recent circumstances, whether in the world or at home. Drastic events, personal problems, as well as pleasant everyday incidents, games, and childhood memories represent the current state of mind of the authors.
Photo: Tomáš Souček
GLORY GLORY
2023 – 2024, Interdisciplinary project
My earlier experience with professional sports became the starting point for this series. The video addresses the social significance of collective sport through a highly subjective monologue. I managed to make the very ‘God of Football’ speak about his own game – its pros as well as its flaws. Concepts such as motivation, discipline, and self-control gave me the idea of two paintings: ‘Training Day’ and ‘Matchday’. The first, referring to the phase of preparation and training, was created over four sessions like a weekly training schedule – each lasting about ninety minutes. During these four intervals, the painting had to be completed. It captures various training situations, including the effects of weather, early mornings, drills, and physical exhaustion. The second painting, ‘Matchday’, was conceived as a match lasting two halfs of 45 minutes with a 15 minute break. In the end, I had to do this match twice – as a rematch – in order to complete the work. Here, thorough preparation was essential, otherwise it would not be possible to complete the work on time.
Strange Fruit - Memento
2023, Painting
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Under the strong impression of injustice in a world full of oppression, racism and misunderstanding, a series was created that serves as a memorial to those who have fallen victim to society, time and circumstance. In my work, i see love, compassion and the willingness to acknowledge our own imperfections as the only way to improve conditions. Through something as traditional as still life painting, I think it is possible to subversively put the seed of an idea by using decent symbolism. New works in this series are in progress.
Strange Fruit – Memento, 70 x 100 cm, acrylic on canvas, 2023
Knock Knock: Exposition of Self-Help Archiving, POP-UP Gallery AVU, Prague, 2023
Artists:
Jan Kostohryz, Vanda Kovaříková, Natálie Pejchová, Michal Rejzek, Lukáš Slavický, Tereza Tomanová
Curators:
Lukáš Machalický and Robert Šalanda
The exhibition subject is the storage of artworks in the domestic or so-called combat conditions of students’ apartments or their modest studios. We show the flip side of the polished blog posts on the Tzvetnik and Artviewer servers, in the Frieze magazine, or the Instagram presentations of the artists themselves. How the works are stored often (although this is not the rule) contrasts significantly with their display in the spaces and expositions of white-cube galleries. We, therefore, present the most authentic possible accounts and reconstructions of how the works rest in storage most of the time.
Comprehensive museum captions accompanying the reconstructions of domestic archives inform about the history of every work and the conditions of its storage, its transfers, or its fates toward recycling and becoming something new.
The exhibition also contains works from the catalog “Painting 1”. The installation displays every piece next to it, open on the page where it appeared. Furthermore, we have approached the Academy of Fine Arts female students to collaborate, who also showcase their stored items. Another component is small-scale photographic research mapping the storage of works by other AVU students and graduates (except for the six exhibiting artists).
avu.cz/en/notice/tuk-tuk-expozice-svepomocne-archivace-exhibition-in-pop-up-gallery-avu
Photo: Tomáš Souček
Burning Distance
2021 – 2024, Series
This series deals with the question whether a meaningful symbiosis between human and nature is still possible. Fragmentation and layering serve as tools to echo the seeming unpredictability of nature. Magnified botanical details – recalling Aldous Huxley’s reflections in The Doors of Perception – act as transmitters that open the pictorial space into deeper strata. The intertwining of forms creates a contemplative surface, inviting a brief access to the hidden side of consciousness. A subtle element of escapism accompanies the process. The paintings search for a primal world and an original state of things, often evoking a nostalgia for places and times we have never known.
Territory, Burning
and Distances
2021 – 2022, Interdisciplinary project
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Experiment of the intersection of two media. The two paintings, one in the 4:3 format (a reference to the former cinematic ratio) and the other in 16:9 (the contemporary widescreen format), act as visual extension of the film, which they both frame and reflect. My long-term fascination with film became explicitly connected to my art practice. I began to translate cinematic concepts – detail, framing, mise-en-scène – into painting. This evolved into a larger experiment: creating an actual self-produced short film. I took on every role – camera, editor, actor, and started to learn the craft through tutorials, books and practice during the lockdown period. The result is a film divided into five chapters, corresponding to five phases of the working process: vision, exploration, proliferation, reduction and realization. Each section is framed by a symbolic gear shift, suggesting a mental journey. The recurring motifs of the car dashboard, the shirt pattern, and the worktable function as visual anchors of transformation. The film blurs the line between cinematic narrative and painterly structure. It becomes a self-reflexive film, that is created in motion, analyzing itself. Through dual characters – the thinker and the actor – the work explores the inner dialogue of creation, the encounter with one’s anima, and the rhythm of making. The setting, a house at the edge of a forest, and natural elements such as fire and rain, carry symbolic weight: transformation and renewal.
From the Archive
of the Earth
2021 – 2023, Series
Triptych From the Archive of the Earth is an open atlas of the planet, its pages revealing the phenomena of humankind, nature, and vegetation. They are filled with both pop-cultural and scientific references – the history of sexuality, photosynthesis, or the story of the woman who single-handedly restored an icon of Christ. The individual chapters can be divided into three main thematic circles: Faith (Passion), Earth, and Humanity.
Nature and human experience here merge into a multilayered narrative. Can information itself be art? And if so, what is its function – does it hold an opinion, shape new meanings, or is it merely a confused cluster of data in an age of visual oversaturation? The frame of the painting forms an imaginary library, where these open books stand like artefacts in a museum.
History of Communication explores the relationship between information and visual art. Its aim is to guide the viewer towards perceiving detail, to take pleasure in discovering meanings, assembling them into context, or, conversely, to perceive only the pictorial surface, free of interpretation. The depicted object becomes a database, whether understood as a catalogue or an encyclopaedia. The image alludes to the history of human communication and the ways messages have been transmitted: signal fires, the messenger of the gods, the oldest surviving epic, and the carrier pigeon captured mid-flight – all in perpetual motion, just like technology itself.
