Jiri Suruvka

It appears that Jiří Surůvka’s exhibition at AMT_project is only his third solo exhibition in Slovakia, whereby it was in Slovakia that he introduced his performances at the so-called Prešpárties (in 1991 and 1992), these being his very first performances “abroad“. The exhibition has a rather retrospective character because of the works from the nineties – works, which are well known and established, but also the newest series of small prints, which turn to the present altogether. Jiří Surůvka, quite possibly one of the most significant Czech artists of the nineties, adheres to a strategy of principled repetition in the field of exhibiting, and especially in the field of selecting themes, which serve him as defensive and generally cautionary gestures towards the world.
Jiří Surůvka’s work is closely connected to his home region, the city of Ostrava. It is no coincidence that the character of his work stems from a folk idea of a guardian of the good in an inhospitable and gangster environment. In the context of the emergence of Czech regional art scenes in the mid-nineties, Ostrava grew from a mere suspicious part of the periphery and a city generally thought of as “the dead city of coal” into an artistic “peripheral” center, from which there came a number of well-known and established artists.
The nineties were full of new war traumas; rapid development of technology had led to an uncertainty of the position of the human being as such in nature. In 1993 a reprise of the crucial exhibition Post Human was held in Deichtorhallen Hamburg, whose massive reach also landed on Surůvka’s work of the late nineties. An interest in new technologies and in a new articulation of humanity brought a revival of Freudian psychoanalysis in Julia Kristeva’s revision. An increased interest in the human body, often in borderline states and leading towards physical instincts in relation to life and death and a fascination with personal and collective trauma had led to questions of reconstructing human nature under the influence of new technologies. Thus, the framework theme of the exhibition is a metamorphosis of the human body, which Surůvka approaches with a somewhat different strategy. He subjects the human body and the extreme situation, in which it may be found, to irony that carries a clear message. The irony then reflects the exhibition on two semantic levels – on a general and on a personal level. In Surůvka’s canvases there appear wartime ordeals and metamorphosing figures of pop-culture icons of their time and strongly ironicized self-portraits stylized into the role of a protector and a prophet.
Utterly essential works in this context are The Engineers of War ( I - III , 1998), in which the characters of hominized fruits play quasi musical instruments made ​​from themselves against a backdrop of some kind of war scenes of destruction, Gilbert and George (1999 ) reminiscent of concentration camp inmates, who are placed on an ornamental background into which crept a swastika, is a critique of the global art market, or the canvas Scream (1996), in which the subject of the iconic Munch painting is replaced by cowboy Woody from one of the first computer-animated films, where the popular symbol of the nineties is threatened by itself. Surůvka has no problem ironizing whatever irritates him and often he ventures into social taboos, such as sharp criticism of Christianity as an ideological tool of power, or the most current topics of the development of radical organizations in the Middle East. The artist places himself in the role of the opposition, as a folk healer of our subconscious traumas of the collective cultural past and especially of the traumas in ourselves.
Jakub Král

Supported by Slovak Arts Council.