Jakub Matuška aka Masker

Jakub Matuška aka Masker (1981) is a graduate of Vladimír Skrepl’s painting studio at Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts and a former central figure (as Masker) of the Czech graffiti scene. Working with a sophisticated and typically distorted drawing style, he mainly explores the subject of man’s impact on the world around him. Beneath a veneer of the grotesque, many of his paintings hide profound thoughts relating to the personal life of the individual and to society-wide conflicts. In his hands, everyday events take on mythical form. Seemingly simple scenes often contain complexly intertwining shapes that may turn an initially revealed meaning upside down. One of Matuška’s central themes is the fragility of human life, which he expresses in his drawings and paintings through strangely twisting and contorted shapes and a grotesque visual style that adds a necessary lightness to this often bitter and oppressive subject matter. Matuška’s art is founded on a distinctive combination of spontaneous pen drawings, digital preparations on an iPad, and the freedom provided by painting itself. He successfully mixes his penchant for digital art with the painting tradition of the Gothic and Renaissance masters and early twentieth-century avant-garde art. Jakub Matuška regularly exhibits at domestic and foreign exhibitions, with recent solo showings at Aleš South Bohemian Gallery (2023) and Villa Pellé (2023). In 2010, he represented the Czech Republic at Expo 2010 in Shanghai, and a year later he won the NG 333 Award.