Escapology No. 7

70% of the hammer price is allocated to support the non-profit foundation Spolu s odvahou, a member of the Bátor Tábor Family.

Josef Achrer is an established painter on the Czech art scene, and his works compose a powerful statement about the reality created by the digital world and the possibilities of escaping from the ideals and discoveries of our time. Achrer studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in the painting studio of Michael Rittstein, but his work is not limited to painting; in recent years he has intensively focused on the photographic technique of the photogram. Achrer’s early works were strongly influenced by American minimalism and explored the possible relationships between abstraction and landscape. In his search for these relationships, he created abstract canvases in RGB colors (red, green, blue)—the basic units of color that make up a digital image, including an image of potential landscapes. A pivotal time for Achrer was his 2013 residency in Beijing, where he worked on his manifesto of dataism, which explores the issue of a life influenced by algorithmized “big data” in the context of a traditional medium such as painting on canvas. The painting Escapology no. 7 is part of a series which, by its very title, refers to the search for an escape from digitized reality. It depicts an abstracted tropical landscape—a fantasy of escape in the manner of Paul Gauguin and many other artists who tried to find themselves in places far from home.