Veselý’s work has evolved smoothly, without major shifts, both in terms of content—where subjects and situations from the artist’s immediate surroundings continue to predominate, along with works that employ geometry, which in turn is based on specific objects— as well as in terms of form, where most of the canvases are rendered in a reduced color palette, primarily in gray and, more rarely, in red.

The exhibition Behind the Column is monothematic, based on paintings and linocuts created in the 1980s, and this theme is now being explored anew. The entire new cycle is rendered in red, a color that otherwise appears only sporadically in his paintings. 

Petr Veselý, painter and poet from the Jundrov smithy. He is one of the few artists who, even in his seventies, continues to maintain a consistently high standard in his work. We were able to see this for ourselves at his major exhibition two years ago, which he held together with Jan Merta at the Kampa Museum, and we can see it again in this current exhibition.

The artist says of the exhibition: “Ordinary, once almost everyday situations, suddenly transformed into existential ones; an uncle stepping onto the porch of a cottage, momentarily partially obscured by a beam of the wooden structure. The intersection of the beams, the figure merging with them… I also perceived in this a reference to the motif of the crucifixion.”  

Petr Veselý (*1953) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague from 1973 to 1979. He began exhibiting independently in 1981. In 1993, he became a member of the Umělecká beseda in Prague. From 2002 to 2007, he headed the painting studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology (FaVU VUT), and subsequently worked as the head of the Painting Department at the Secondary School of Applied Arts (SŠUD; formerly SŠUŘ) in Brno. He lives and works in Brno-Jundrov.

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