Adam Kašpar

Adam Kašpar (1993), a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts, is one of the most distinctive representatives of realistic landscape painting today. Although he is often compared to Julius Mařák because of his ability to capture the silent atmosphere of deep forests and primeval woods, his approach to painting and choice of subjects differ significantly from traditional Romantic landscape painting. Besides “living” landscapes, he also explores inorganic minerals and cosmic bodies, silent reminders of the fact that even non-living matter is subject to the same evolutionary dynamics as organic forms of life. He also produces plein- air works, which he views not as a means of capturing the ephemeral beauty of “untamed” nature in the spirit of the nineteenth-century landscape painters, but rather as a way of exploring the layered archive of Planet Earth. His landscapes are made with an almost scientific precision, with the help of microscopes, telescopes, and sketchbooks filled with notes on sedimentation or the morphology of the terrain. Although it may seem that Kašpar avoids any hint of a human presence in his works, upon closer inspection we find depictions of monoculture forests, the North Bohemian Coal Basin, and other landscapes that have been profoundly affected by human activity. Rather than pre-humanistically Romantic, his art should thus be interpreted as post-humanist, disrupting the boundary between nature and culture. Adam Kašpar’s works can be found in numerous prominent collections of contemporary art and have been shown at many foreign and domestic exhibitions of Czech art. Examples include The Light within a Picture: Czech Impressionism (Prague Castle Riding School, 2017) and All Power to the Imagination in Dresden, which, through the work of fifty-one artists, presented Czech modern and contemporary art as a distinctive cultural phenomenon of European significance.