Was there ever a time when you thought about going back to the Czech Republic? Then I wouldn’t see the point of living elsewhere.” Which I think is quite healthy and good because if you want to live somewhere else you should really engage with the group where you are and not just stay in the bubble with your own culture. I’m not very much engaged in the Czech community, that’s true – I don’t know why, but I guess we are not grouping much.
“But I would say now it’s definitely international, because London is international, and you meet so many different people. It was a mix of people – I also tried to invite bankers and curators and people who like art. “At the beginning it was mostly Czech people – I would organise outings every month to see the galleries and we would talk a lot. What kind of community do you have here – do you hang out mainly with other Czechs, or is it more international?
#THE DARKNESS II GET TO THE BAESMENT ARCHIVE#
Zuzana in Paris Studio, 2006-7 | Acrylic on canvas 130 x 110 cm | Photo: Archive of Hynek Martinec I met nice people, very helpful people, so I kind of naturally got into the art world.” So I had quite good access, I felt almost like London was calling me. I think that saved me five years of work maybe. “I didn’t think like that when I came here, but I was very lucky in that I was showing the portrait of my partner Zuzana at the National Portrait Gallery, and it won the BP Young Artist award in 2007, and that was an absolutely great entrance to London. Was it difficult to establish yourself as an artist in London – especially a successful one – because London is a famously expensive city? But I wanted to have it that way at that time, I wanted to be under that pressure – that’s what London always gives to everyone.” So that’s what I miss from Prague and Paris - I would say that these two cities are amazing for thinking. “But I think that in Paris and Prague, you kind of feel something in the air, you meet the right people, and there is time for thinking, which I think in London is a little bit tricky. Maybe the reason was also that when I was looking at the art magazines at the academy where I was studying, I was always dreaming about what it must be like to be in London meeting those artists, and I wanted to see it in the flesh.” I was young and I felt like I needed something new. “I studied art there for 10 years, and then I felt that actually I needed to discover something else, and London seemed to me like the perfect place. During a recent trip to the UK, I spoke to him in the basement of the gallery where the new exhibition ABSURD was being installed upstairs, and we had a conversation spanning all kinds of things, from his family to his sources of inspiration, and from how Czechs embrace darkness more than the Brits to why he dreams more vividly in London than in Prague.īut first of all, I asked him why he left the Czech Republic in the first place, 15 years ago. Martinec has been living in London since 2007, the same year he won the BP award. London | Photo: jikatu, CC BY-SA 2.0 Generic
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