There are artists whose paintings everyone knows. And then there are artists without whom Czech art would look very different. Rostislav Novák belongs to the latter group.

He belonged to a generation that sought a new freedom in Czech painting in the 1980s. He exhibited at the legendary Konfrontace; following the controversy surrounding his exhibition at Kotva, he worked under the pseudonym Pavel Host; and as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, he influenced a generation that produced Jiří David, Petr Nikl, Martin Mainer, Tomáš Císařovský, Antonín Střížek, and other prominent figures in contemporary Czech art.

While his students made their mark on art history, Novák voluntarily remained on the sidelines. At the end of the road. In a former Sudeten pub in Sádek near Žatec. Far from fashion trends and artistic strategies. All the while, he taught and painted.

And he painted tirelessly. His paintings are explosive. Wild. Layered. Punk. Ecstatic. They are a record of a physical struggle with painting. They are not decoration. They are an event. Many of the exhibited works spent decades hidden in the attic of the artist’s home. In the company of himself and bats. Today, they are returning to the light.

The exhibition Dangerous Places is not just a retrospective of sorts. It is the return of one of the most authentic painters of his generation.