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Oil on canvas. Signed lower left: “M. Kunc 91”. Painter Milan Kunc is among only a handful of Czech artists who contributed to shaping an important international movement or tendency. He is a major exponent of the return of the figure in the 1970s, after a period when conceptual art dominated the international stage. He had experienced this himself as a student of Josef Beyus and Gerhard Richter at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where classic painting was considered entirely outdated. By that time he had already completed four years of the Academy in Prague, where he had been expelled allegedly due to a lack of talent, and had emigrated to West Germany in 1969. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he and his two classmates, Czech Jan Knap and German Peter Angermann, established the art group NORMAL, which together with the Neue Wilde and Transavantgarde helped to shape post-modern painting. They pitted humor against the seriousness of those who saw art as a tool for world revolution, pitted the traditional language of the picture, Rouseau the Customs Officer and artists of the Early Renaissance against the coded language of the art world. Kitsch became another important component in Kunc's work. After a residence in New York, he moved to Rome in 1988, where he remained until 1991. Via Appia, influenced most by Neoclassicism from his Italian residence, dates from this period.