Tomáš Císařovský

“We found our themes ourselves. There were foundations, of course. Figure drawing, portraits, nudes, still lifes, loose compositions. You could put an awful lot into that. But basically we were in a schizophrenic situation, where you completed these tasks as a breeze, just to fulfil the bare minimum, and you saved ninety per cent of your time to do what you wanted to. What you considered necessary. Because by then we could hear the growing echoes of the new artistic direction pushing its way through Western Europe and America. We called it the New Wave. It appealed to us a lot. In fact, it was the reason why my colleagues and I got together and formed some kind of generational core. We started searching for options of how to confront each other, to display our works and show them to other people who might be interested as well.”

“And the main thing, of fatally existential importance, was that if you weren’t hooked up in that system of funds and unions, you were practically a freeloader. You didn’t have a stamp in your ID card. And so the very first time they checked you, you went somewhere, I don’t know where. You were in big trouble, you had to get employed. Lots of people solved this by entering a parallel world, they were boiler men, cleaners. But this system of corruption worked perfectly. Ninety per cent of people did everything they could to be integrated in the fund, because of the advantages it gave.”