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Oil on canvas. Signed lower right: “TIKAL 46”; description by artist on stretcher frame. Atomic Reflexes, which debuted at a traveling exhibition of the Ra art group in 1947 and has been missing since then, is according the the expert opinion of PhDr. Rea Michalová, PhD: "... an original, exclusive, and extremely rare work among collectors by Václav Tikal, a major 20th century Czech painter, founding member of the Ra art group, and member of the Signs of the Zodiac group. He had to work hard to become an artist: he was thirty by the time he started studying at the Academy of Fine Art in Prague, initially studying under Vratislav Nechleba and later under Jakub Obrovsky. After Hitler ordered that Czech universities be shut down, Tikal and his colleagues were left to their own devices. Because modern art had to be kept underground, fostering contacts was also associated with risk. In this atmosphere Karel Teige played an extremely important role, maintaining continuity among those who found Poetism and Surrealism a "lifetime philosophy and state of mind." In parallel with his Surrealist work, Tikal developed another, perhaps even more interesting and unique line in his work that was inspired by modern scientific and technical civilization. This painting, Atomic Reflexes, is a brilliant and rare example of this 'scientific' poetry of the picture, which in the context of art at the time successfully connected the interwar influences of Constructivism, Surrealism and Civilism. Here we witness the birth of the artist's new world of fantastical mechanisms and structures that become a poetic paraphrase of the reality of the atomic age. In the maximally reduced language of poetically colored areas, abstract structures and exact geometric lines forming a novel three-dimensional shape, Tikal executes a fascinating representation of a new civilizational myth on the canvas, through which the rationalism of modern science communicates the human emotional experience." Ref.: Jiří Vykoukal, Václav Tikal 1906–1925, pub. State Gallery of Fine Arts, Cheb, in conjunction with the State Galleries in Hluboka nad Vltavou, Jihlava, Zlin, Olomouc, Ostrava and Prague, 1993, p. 71.