David Hanvald was born in the north Bohemian town of Liberec in 1980. He lives and works there to this day. For centuries, the town was to a large extent ethnically German. (Its German-name is Reichenberg.) Hence the German name of the exhibition. David is undoubtedly one of the most interesting painters of the young, up-and-coming generation.
After brief stints in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Ústí nad Labem and at the Technical University of Liberec, David studied painting in the studio of Stanislav Diviš at the Academy of Art, Architecture and Design in Prague from 2003 to 2009.
He has shown his works in a good number of exhibitions. Of his solo exhibitions one would mention ‘System, Structure, Order’ at the Gallery Behind the Wall (Galerie Za stěnou) of the Wannieck Gallery, Brno (2010), or ‘Upgrade’ at the Art Centre (Dům umění), České Budějovice (2011).
I went straight to the heart of the matter and asked him a couple of questions about his work, for example, what he actually paints. ‘I paint artefacts from art history,’ says David. ‘If photography is my model, then it is a stylized carry-over into the medium of painting. If it is an art object that I choose to paint, I am interested in its construction and transformation into painting, and if the model is painting, the result may be a stretcher frame.’
David selects what he wants from the art of the twentieth century, which is in its own way conceptual, that is, it has a certain intellectual structure but also a clear, striking form. His visual conceptual game crosses over from three-dimensional space to flat surface, so that he can, as a painter, create the impression of space: the empty space under a chair becomes the starting motif for the structure of a chair; vivid colour enlivens the coolness of the structure. Gradually, in his own way, he has reinterpreted the works of a whole range of Modernist artists. From the architectural ground plan of Louis Kahn, for example, he interprets the minimalistic series of Donald
Judd, the ‘structures’ of Sol LeWitt, and the chairs of Marcel Breuer. He also made constructions of the stretcher frames of Sigmar Polke and interprets the photographic still lifes of Josef Sudek by means of shadows and light. To those who might think that he has made an easy choice and has somehow given up his own art to reinterpret famous models, David replies: ‘I also have series of painting which do not start from any models. But concerning the series that draw on some art, say, the sculpture of Bruce Nauman or the stretchers of Sigmar Polke, I am mainly seek to use them as an impulse to begin the individual series, which is no longer important for its subsequent expansion. In the second phase of painting it becomes independent; it is original creation. Not to mention the individual aestheticization of the painting, form, brush-work, colour. You can’t adopt a personal style.’
Those last words would be a nice name for the exhibition. Take it, then, as the subtitle of the recent collection. But one last inquisitive question: What is David actually saying with his paintings? ‘I’m communicating a certain aesthetic, an aesthetic look that the viewer will either find pleasant or won’t. But it isn’t only a question of the aesthetic layer of my work; it also has to do with a certain coding, the memory of the times, the history of art, links to society, continuity. What’s important is not to reject the art of the previous generations, unlike what used to happen quite often. In these times, in our generation, we don’t reject them. This tends to have more to do with mutually taking advantage of various aesthetics, not having to knocking preceding artists.’
Perhaps all that remains to be said is that a whole range of other artists are also currently responding to Modern impulses for art, and so one can, in connection with them and with David, reasonably talk about a Neo-Modern style. And it is also fair to say that David Hanvald stands at its centre as one of the initiators.
Martin Dostál