Draft:Pavel Hayek

Pavel Hayek (born; 10 march 1959) is a Czech painter and graphic artist living in Brno.

Biography

From 1973 to 1982, he attended the J. Kvapil People’s School of Art in Brno, where he studied under Petr Skácel.^[1] From 1990 to 2001, he was a member of the TT Club, and since 1998 he has been a member of the Concretists’ Club.^[2][3]

He worked at the Moravian Gallery, House of Arts Brno, and the Wannieck Gallery in Brno.

Work

In the early 1990s, painter and graphic artist Pavel Hayek developed his unique, unmistakable artistic vocabulary based on innovatively devised and distinctive structures that are mostly composed of natural elements.^[4] Featuring primarily the contrast of white and black, the rationally conceived paintings of this period were in many ways a continuation of the artist’s experiments with photograms^[5], in which he worked with silhouettes of plant details. This period was represented in particular by large-format canvases with a full-frontal structure made of the outlines of small natural objects, such as garlic, apples, tree leaves or plant seeds.^[6]

Since 2000, the structures have included tree crowns, contrasting and dramatic torsos of old trees and lyrical landscape sections. Sometimes the paintings point to the original material, at other times they become hard-to-read abstract surfaces.

Around 2014, Pavel Hayek began to make the painting series Textiles, in which he visualizes the theme of the breaking or deformation of a regular geometric order. Textile patterns of fabrics, such as stripes, polka dots, checkers, etc., are deformed by the rippling or squeezing of the fabric, sometimes to the point of becoming unrecognizable.

The painting cycles Mechanical Scores, which have also originated since 2014, are an excursus into a different field. There, the artist has turned to a technical element, records intended for music boxes. The strips or discs with signs are transcriptions of scores for these instruments. The rationally created images-scores again create a structure that involves dynamics, a metrical structure as well as overall musicality. The following series consists of paintings created around 2016 made using decorative paint rollers. The entire surface of the painting is covered with impressions of a single type of roller pattern. The artist uses different ways of applying the roller trace, from its doubling and blurring to overlapping multiple layers. The patterns of decorative rollers thus create abstract structures treated with rhythms and ornaments, and at the same time combined with gestures of the hand.

Around 2018, the artist began to make geometric black and white paintings characterized by a strong optical effect. They have large formats and are made by overlaying dense geometric grids with basic geometric shapes that cover the surface with some spacing, often with a rotation around the centre. This creates a moiré visual effect, which enlivens this otherwise mechanical vocabulary. The following series of paintings features two overlapping grids of different geometric shapes, again in positive and negative. This gives rise to structures of geometric fragments where the different geometric forms intersect, with the fixed geometric order again being disrupted and disturbed.^[7]

Hayek’s world of structures is highly mutable, imaginative and aesthetic in the best sense of the word.^[8]

In presenting his work, Pavel Hayek has long collaborated with the German Edition & Galerie Hoffmann in the Frankfurt gallery circuit; his paintings have been presented at major international art fairs, including Art Cologne, Art Paris and others. In the Czech Republic, the artist collaborates with Zdeněk Sklenář Gallery, Galerie Petr Novotný^[9] and Galerie Závodný, among others.

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