Lot 135

Michael Rittstein (1949) 1/2 THROUGH

1/2 THROUGH is an exemplary work from the 1990s production of Michael Rittstein, one of the most important exponents of contemporary Czech painting. This painting captures the characteristic elements of the artist’s artworks: through his inimitable, expressive style, it presents a narrative figurative scene with a sarcastic, ironic caricature of everyday life.

Rittstein is a classic on the Czech art scene, a member of the 12/15 art group and Mánes Union of Fine Artists as well as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (head professor of the Painting studio since 2001). An exponent of grotesque expressionism, since the start of his career he has based his work on his own themes or on personal or intimately known experiences. He is a supporter of “traditional painting” with a specific Central European sense of ambiguity and context, into which he reflects the dismal period of “Normalization” and New Figuration. Rittstein’s figures, usually from family life, bear individual characteristics, but at times transform into color fields or silhouettes – into the staffage of the mundane and of Surrealist deviations.