BWA Contemporary Art Gallery in Katowice

‘Over a period spanning some fifty years, the Czech artist Jiří Anderle has produced a large a varied body of work, including prints, drawings, paintings and sculptures. For all its variety of forms and techniques, however, Anderle’s art is characterised by one important principle: a humanist vision transcending immediate notions of time and cultural distinction, one that explores the most fundamental questions facing modern man.
In his work, Anderle presents us with a unique human story. His creative approach can be compared with an anatomical examination of human being. He observes and maps out the complex mosaic that makes us human, doing so at both a personal and more broadly collective level. His pictures record everything that remains hidden to the ordinary eye; with the sensitivity of an imaginary seismograph, he makes visible the impulses and rhythms of our inner life. He vividly and diversely registers the ever-changing stream of our thoughts, as well as the deeper currents of our intuitive urges. In his images, we see the entire human condition through and through, from hormonal desires to the bare bones of existence. Anderle’s artistic theatrum mundi presents the eternal drama of our mortal deeds, the neverending cycle of genesis and extinction. He talks to us of the powerful duality that has its source in the different hemispheres of the human brain. This duality unfolds through an omnipresent dialogue between past and present, between illusion and reality, between reason and instinct and ultimately in the struggle between good and evil. Fragments of this dialogue are then assembled in rich variations, passing through the prism of an often grotesque metamorphosis. It is paradoxically this deformation that enables the truest portrait of the tangled labyrinth of our human character.
Jiří Anderle creates a mental landscape in which he gradually reveals hidden or forgotten layers of the human mind. This submersion towards an essential core soon brought soon in his career to what was until recently termed primitive art, a form of expression in which fear, wonder and creativity find a strongly plastic form. These artefacts, nowadays called primal art, provided Anderle with a formidable counterweight to the cultural phenomena and prejudices of Western civilisation. They opened the way for him to acquire a better understanding of the original spark of creative instinct, that magic out of which there also emerged the seeds of mythology and spiritual reflection on the world. It is quite logical for his broad humanist understanding and belief in the multiplicity of vision in time and space that the echoes of primal expression fuse with  the tragic fate of contemporary civilisation. This perceptive insight into morally binding human interrelation is possibly Anderle’s most important contributions to the international scene.’

Richard Drury

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