Naked Ape
Painting and video by Lawrence Wells

The naked monkey goes outside, gets cold and everybody laughs at him. Making art is the same, it exists beyond language, it is exposed, if its any good it takes a risk and many people don't know what to say about it. Rather than hide behind a mirage of intellectual theory, the art work stands naked, often cold and lonely in the corner. As a foreign monkey, my work is about the search for meaning in a chaotic incomprehensible world, about colonialism, xenophobia and the problem of evil, about man's foolish pride and vanity in a world of naked apes. We are all going to die one day, maybe for one moment we can open the doors, stand naked before each other, at least once while we're still here. As Joseph Beuys said, “Show your wound”, because in the end, there's not much time.
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Lawrence Wells (b. 1965) is an American painter and long-term resident of the Czech Republic. He studied painting at Indiana University, and received his MFA from the University of Mississippi (1992). Wells was among the first wave of American expats to Prague in the early 90s. He returned to the USA in ’93 and after 8 years, living in New Orleans and New York, he returned to Prague in 2001. In the years 2007–2008 he had a residency at Meet Factory. Now he works at Pragovka in former industrial building at Vysočany.