Ivan Ouhel: New Images, Ostrava, 2011

Curator:	Eva Adamcová, Ivan Ouhel, Linda Sedláková
Introductory speech:	Milan Weber
Place:	Exhibition Hall Sokolská st. 26, Ostrava
Date:	6. 10. - 11. 11. 2011
Contact:	www.ckv-ostrava.cz

 

 

 

 

After four years, Ivan Ouhel returned to his hometown Ostrava with an exhibition. These years were full of incidents bringing numerous new impulses to his work. On the one hand, he worked on his monograph, freshening up the questions and topics he had already concentrated on in the past. Now and then, they emerged on his new canvases again – rotation, playful sprouts following the Vegetace (Vegetation) cycle from the 1980s, geometric motifs, reminiscent in their colourfulness of Toronta (Torontos) from 2005, but treated with new insight and experience. The inner world of the paintings is full of commotion, but the restlessness of the past years is gone. The happening under and above water surfaces or the face of earth is full of joy of the beauties of the world and action; small colourful "microorganisms" playfully roaming through the space, pacified by neat geometric elements defining their position within the canvas. And even though these mostly are red and black sectors and uncompromising lines, they create a rather calming effect on the canvas. They bring peace and order to the space.
The painter is also inspired by his several visits to Indonesia, as the names of his recent works show. For the first time, he travelled to this beautiful country in 2008, when he and his wife visited his son, who regularly stays and works there for a part of the year. Since then, he returns to this exotic world any time he has the opportunity to do so and his travels bear abundant fruits, as documented by this exhibition.