Ivan Bukovský (born 7 July 1949) is a Czech painter, illustrator and pedagogue. He teaches art, painting and drawing, history and history of art. He is a leading figure in Czech figurative painting and the New Figuration movement.Millennium Gallery: Ivan BukovskýPlatýz Gallery: Ivan Bukovský He is the recipient of several international awards for painting, the founder of the art society "Orbis pictus: Europa", and of the international project "The Infinite Painting".
Life Bukovský was born 7 July 1949, Prague. Both of his parents were secular Jews who met in the Theresienstadt Ghetto during World War II. His father, Otto Schwarz, was deported from Theresienstadt in 1944 to Auschwitz, where he survived to see liberation; his mother, Marianna, was sent through Theresienstadt, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen. As a prewar communist, his father found employment after the war in the Press Department of the Ministry of Information and Education. In 1951, he was dismissed and interrogated; thereafter, until his retirement, he worked as an instructor for corporate journalists at Průmstav. His mother, who was fluent in German and English and had worked as a foreign-language correspondent and stenographer before the war, became a clerk in foreign trade after the war.Paměť Národa / Memory of Nations: Ak. painter Ivan Bukovský (1949)
Ivan Bukovský grew up in a family environment influenced primarily by Christian culture and Greek mythology. He did not discover Jewish culture until he visited relatives in Israel in 1963. He painted from early childhood and, from 1964 to 1968, attended the Václav Hollar School of Fine Arts. At that time, the school focused primarily on commercial art and did not meet his expectations. He was employee for two years and briefly studied art history and aesthetics. In 1971, he was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague to study in the studio of Prof. Jan Smetana.Livebod: Ivan Bukovský In 1974, he received the 17 November Student Award. In 1975, together with Jan Bouška, and in 1976 for the first time on his own, he exhibited at the small, unofficial gallery of the Nerudovka Theater.Souborný katalog výstav, Divadlo v Nerudovce / Comprehensive Catalog of Exhibitions, 1980, pp. 9, 11, fig. 52, II He participated in the significant generational "Exhibition of Young Artists" at Mánes (1976). After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts (1976), he married in 1978 and moved first to Dobříš and later to Příbram.
In 1978, he participated in the unofficial generational group exhibition Confrontation at the Institute of Microbiology of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. Together with his classmate from the Academy, Jiří Sozanský, he co-organized the first of three unofficial art symposia in Small Fortress in Terezín in 1980. Two days after it opened, an information embargo was imposed on the exhibition by order of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, but newspapers and television had already reported on it, and the ban actually increased attendance. Until the end of the 1980s, Bukovský exhibited mostly in smaller galleries outside Prague.
In 1961, he appeared in the short student film Králíček ('little rabbit') directed by Dušan Klein.Filmový přehled: Králíček / Film Review: Králíček From 1984 to 1990, he collaborated with Krátký film (Short film) Prague.Milan Hlaveš, 2006, p. 128 In the early 1990s, he visited Italy at the invitation of the Lucchetti brothers and Israel in 1993.
From 1996 to 2003, he headed the graphic design program at the Secondary Vocational School and Higher Vocational School in Štětí; from 2003 to 2020, he taught high school students art history, history, and art education at the Příbram Waldorf SchoolPříběhy našich sousedů / Stories of our neighbors: Ivan Bukovský; and from 2020 – 2026, he taught figurative painting and drawing as a part-time teacher at the Faculty of Education at the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice.
In 2001 he founded the art society Orbis pictus: Europa (abbreviated as OPE)Nekonečné plátno – největší obraz světa, Hornické muzeum Příbram / The Endless Canvas – The World's Largest Painting, Příbram Mining Museum with his friend Lubomír Pešek († 2022)Lukáš Hron, Zemřel autor nekonečného obrazu. Uznávanému českému malíři říkali tulák po Evropě / The creator of the "Endless Painting" has died. The renowned Czech painter was known as a "wanderer through Europe.", CNN Prima, 2022 . With the support of the then-senator for the Příbram region, Ing. Zdeněk Vojíř, and in collaboration with the Czech Centers, they launched an ambitious project titled The Infinite Canvas, later renamed to the more precise The Infinite Painting. The project was intended to be an expression of the artists' shared message for a vision of Europe in the third millennium and to contribute to the cultural integration of Europe. By 2005, it had taken place in fifteen European countries—the Netherlands, France, Austria, Germany, Italy, Romania, Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Russia, Wales, Northern Ireland, Ireland, Sweden, and Hungary. In 2003 and 2004, the OPE arts organization received an award from the Director General of the Czech Centers for the best program in the visual arts.
The project consisted of a joint exhibition by Bukovský and Pešek with one or two local artists, while other artists created paintings on a 12-meter roll of canvas. Over the course of six years, approximately 500 artists participated, and nearly 400 meters of the "Endless Painting" were created. Another 100 meters or so were painted by children from children's homes. Eighty meters of the canvases are on display at the Vojna MemorialThe Vojna Camp was built between 1947 and 1949 by German prisoners of war and was named after the nearby Vojna Hill. After the prisoners of war left—from mid-1949 through 1951—the camp began to serve as a forced-labor camp for political prisoners of the emerging communist regime. The prisoners were used primarily as slave laborers to extract uranium ore in nearby mines., and the exhibition is regularly updated.
Ivan Bukovský lives and works in Příbram. He was a member of the Lipany art group (1991–1992), the SVU Mánes (1992–2013), and the Central Bohemian Association of Visual Artists. After leaving the SVU Mánes, he became a member of the Free Association M (founded in 2013).
Awards 1974 17 November Award, for students of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague 1984 Special Prize, III: Triennial of Young Painters, Sofia 1985 Prize for Drawing, 1st Triennial of Anti-War Drawings and Prints, Majdanek (Poland) 1996 Fundación Barceló Prize (Spain) 2007 Jury Prize, Premio San Crispino (Italy) 2008 Critics' Prize, Porto S'Elpidio (Italy) 2015 "Identification Code of Slovakia" (IKS) PrizeTASR: Ocenenie Identifikačný kód Slovenska získalo 17 osobností z kultúry / Seventeen cultural figures received the "Identification Code of Slovakia" award, 28.11.2015
Work Ivan Bukovský belongs to the younger generation of the broad movement known as Czech New Figuration, which originally emerged from Czech Informel and retained its existential foundations and expressiveness. It built upon the work of the founders of Czech modernism from the mid-1960s to respond in its own way to the atmosphere of normalization, in which hopelessness, social hypocrisy, and the absurdity of everyday life—sometimes bordering on the grotesque—were intertwined. This generation, which left school during the harsh Normalization period in the second half of the 1970s, found opportunities to exhibit only in unofficial galleries or those outside Prague. Any attempt to act independently was immediately met with bans.
Bukovský was influenced by Renaissance and Baroque painting, as well as by Rembrandt, Italian Civilismo, and European New Figuration. Like many of his contemporaries, his work responds to the psychologically intense paintings of Francis Bacon, the expressive paintings of Chaïm Soutine, and those of František Mertl.
Even while still a student, Ivan Bukovský painted works that demonstrated a sense of monumental space, in which dramatically arranged compositions and powerful figurative gestures created a cohesive, scenographically composed arena.Richard Drury, Ostrava 2007
In his early work, Bukovský drew inspiration from the world of rock music and student parties. A change occurred in 1977–1978, when, together with Jiří Sozanský, he traveled to the Small Fortress in Terezín to study archives and witness testimonies. During the subsequent three-month art symposium (1980), which was also attended by Zdeněk Beran, Oldřich Kulhánek, and Lubomír Janečka, they created installations in the former prison cells intended to evoke some of the horror experienced by the prisoners of the concentration camp. The communists correctly recognized that this was a mirror held up to any totalitarian regime, and so they first attempted to close the site and then ended the exhibition prematurely.Jiří Sozanský, Rekonstrukce jednoho případu, Ministerstvo kultury ČR / Reconstruction of a particular case, Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, 1991
Bukovský reflects the bleak situation of the second half of the 1970s through motifs of walls and labyrinths from which one tries in vain to escape. Architectural elements—such as gray walls, tombstones, catafalques, shattered sarcophagi, stone pedestals, sacrificial altars, tables, and thrones—became a recurring feature in most of his paintings. These geometrically austere shapes divide the pictorial space vertically or horizontally, serving as both support and obstacle, or accentuating the dynamics of the action through diagonal divisions.Pometlo J, Ostrava 2010, introductory text They contrast with the figures and organic matter in general and draw attention to the central plot.
In the 1980s, Bukovský explored ordinary human situations from everyday life, but he saw himself as a mere observer of these phenomena and maintained an intellectual distance. Tetiva uses the term "interpretive images" to describe them. He found his subjects in the expressive gestures of figures in newspaper photographs or as conveyed by a black-and-white television screen. This was reflected in his subdued color palette, dominated by gray (Portrait, 1983; Retirement Home, 1983). The frontal shot and the apparent randomness of the figures' placement in the composition evoke a snapshot, capturing a moment in time focused solely on the essential elements of expression, gesture, or clothing. This "eye-to-eye" communication captures the truth of life uncompromisingly and without embellishment.Tetiva V, 1993, p. 74
The characters' actions create an unsettling, even surreal impression and often depict some kind of extreme event. The motif of an accident and the subsequent brutal attempt to rescue the victim against her will (Accident, 1980, Crossing, 1981) speaks to the existential foundations of Bukovský's work. The apocalyptic vision of Mr. Oppenheimer's Laboratory (1980) explores humanity's futile efforts to control nature, which can only lead to catastrophe. In the second half of the 1980s, he went through a creative crisis and destroyed or repainted most of the paintings from that period.