Melancholic

Lubomír Typlt is one of the most prominent painters of the generation who began making their mark on the Czech art scene in the late 1990s. He also exhibits regularly abroad, and his works have long enjoyed significant acclaim in the art market. He studied at several different art schools, including the prestigious Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Markus Lüpertz, Gerhard Merz, and A. R. Penck. It was precisely this German environment, rooted in the tradition of expressive figurative painting, that played a crucial role in shaping his artistic language. Typlt’s early work developed along two parallel lines. The first consisted of constructively conceived abstraction and schematic depictions of strange “metaphysical” machines. The second, which would define his subsequent work, was neo-expressive figurative painting, in which the artist demonstrated his flair for dramatic composition and intense color. Nevertheless, the principle of mechanical construction persists in Typlt’s paintings: Motifs are repeated, arranged in grids, and varied within precisely constructed compositions. His large-format canvases are populated by allegorical characters that recur throughout his entire body of work or even within a single painting, where one type of figure may appear multiple times. In this way, Typlt has long been building a distinctive visual mythology of the human individual - lonely, multiplied, disassembled, and reassembled within the space of the painting. The painting Melancholic is part of a series of twelve nearly identical portraits of a boy arranged in a grid structure under the title I Am Multiplied and Divided and Constantly in the Red. The face is divided into colored quadrants, while the boy’s intense red gaze distills the emotional tension that gives this painting its title.

70 % of the hammer prize is allocated to support the non-profit Vlček Faminly Foundation.