Tomas Rajlich. Fundamental Painting
Opening 16 November, 5 - 7 pm
in the presence of the artist
BorzoGallery is proud to present an overview of paintings from the 1960s to the present by Tomas Rajlich (b. 1940 Jankov, Czech Republic).
A small but very beautiful exhibition 'Tomas Rajlich - Paint Structures' in 2016 in the Kunstmuseum, The Hague was the reason for a closer acquaintance with this Czech-Dutch artist. Nevertheless, it has taken until now to convert that contact into an exhibition in our Amsterdam gallery.
After the Prague Spring of 1968, which was crushed with brutal violence, Tomas and Jitka Rajlich fled to the Netherlands a year later and settled in The Hague, which would become their new home city.
Already in Prague, Rajlich found himself in avant-garde circles and exhibited experimental work, inspired by influences such as the international ZERO movement. Once in the Netherlands, he felt he belonged to the tradition of Mondrian, but also to that of Schoonhoven and herman de vries, among others.
The important exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum under Edy de Wilde in 1975 'Fundamental Painting' was a crucial milestone in the introduction to Minimal art from America. It was the first exhibition in the Netherlands where artists such as Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin, Robert Mangold, Sol Lewitt and Brice Marden were on display. Work by the 'icons' Newman, Kelly and Stella hung in the Hall of Honor. (On later trips to America he met some of these colleagues, from which friendships developed). Artists from the Netherlands included Jaap Berghuis and …… Tomas Rajlich.
Meanwhile, Rajlich had developed his own style with elements of and similarities with the geometric abstraction of Mondrian, the structured reliefs of Schoonhoven and the monochromy of American Color field and Minimal art painters. The result shows a unique idiom in the form of a geometric pattern often used by him, a 'grid' of horizontal and vertical lines, in which not only the structure of the painting is important to Rajlich, but also the texture, the paint skin of the painting.
Rajlich soon had several exhibitions in the Netherlands at the avant-garde gallery Art & Project. In 2010 he returned to his home city of Prague with his wife.
