Vladimír Véla

Vladimír Véla (1980) is a member of the generation of painters who emerged onto the scene with the start of the new millennium. During his student days, he worked in a diverse range of artistic disciplines: he started with metal casting at secondary school and continued with representational painting under Zdeněk Beran at the Academy of Fine Arts before unexpectedly transferring to Milan Knížák’s studio. With this transition from figurative painting to intermedia art, Véla could approach art-making as a performative, expressive gesture. Thanks to these experiences, he arrived at his distinctive style closely reminiscent of lyrical abstraction and meditative Rothko-esque painting. It is important for him to be in contact with nature, which, alongside sacral themes, forms a central motif of his early body of work. Today, he creates paintings that express both natural processes as well as inner human motivations. He regularly revisits the themes from his Resolution series, which reflects the schism between two seemingly incompatible entities. In addition to his work as an artist, Véla also heads the painting studio at the University of West Bohemia’s Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art in Pilsen. In 2008 and 2009, he was a finalist for the NG 333 Award presented by the National Gallery Prague. His art can be found in public and private collections in the Czech Republic, and he has exhibited at domestic and foreign galleries and institutions, including the important exhibition The Butterfly Effect? at Galerie Rudolfinum (2013).