Stumbling Through Life

Upcoming exhibition

The exhibition will present a selection of mostly never-before-exhibited paintings from 2018–2025. I have prepared a soundtrack for the exhibition — a sound collage that will accompany the exhibited works and help create a complete audiovisual experience.

The intended centerpiece of the exhibition is the painting The Turin Horse (100 × 120 cm, oil on canvas, 2025), which I am currently finishing:

Read the full story of this painting →

The painting draws on a famous moment from the life of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In January 1889, he is said to have witnessed a coachman brutally beating an exhausted horse in the streets of Turin. Nietzsche ran to the horse, threw his arms around its neck, and burst into tears. Shortly afterwards he suffered a mental breakdown — and never fully recovered. The scene is often interpreted as a symbol of ultimate compassion, of the break between reason and feeling, between philosophy and the reality of human suffering.

"GREEK MYTHOLOGY IN BLUE" (2023) is a collage measuring 250 × 53 cm. It was commissioned by a Dutch gallery which, unfortunately, closed down shortly before the work was completed. The piece has not yet been mounted.

More about this artwork →

(the easel bar measures 50 cm)

The Darkest Hour Is Just Before Dawn

It’s been my favourite painting ever since I made it, in 2024.

The cut-out’s title is taken from the song Dedicated to the One I Love, made famous by The Mamas & the Papas.

The words are directly embedded in the composition itself — floating in the space as text that catches the attention of the figure beside it. The line resonated deeply with me in periods when the darkness seemed almost without a way out.

The simple metaphor the line carries also opens up a space for hope: after the darkest hour, relief and a return to balance often follow.

I finished the cut-out just a few days before my thirtieth birthday. Its working title was BLIND TO THE TRUTH. The figure in the cut-out is gouging out its own eye — symbolically denying itself the ability to see the truth, the help, and the solution present right in front of it. Through this act, it closes itself off within its own limited perception of reality.

The motif can be read as a metaphor for ordinary human behaviour: in difficult times we often cannot focus on the positive or available solutions, and instead sink into our own negative thoughts. In doing so we make change and improvement harder for ourselves, even though the way out may in fact be closer than it seems.

The Turin Horse

I carried the motif of this painting in my head for nearly ten years. It kept coming back to me — not as a specific scene, but as a feeling. A feeling of compassion, helplessness, and a strange estrangement from a world in which cruelty is often regarded as a normal part of human progress.

The painting draws on a famous moment from the life of Friedrich Nietzsche. In January 1889, he is said to have witnessed a coachman brutally beating an exhausted horse in the streets of Turin. Nietzsche ran to it, threw his arms around its neck, and burst into tears. Shortly afterwards he suffered a mental breakdown and never fully recovered.

The scene is often understood as a symbol of the final clash between feeling and rationality, between abstract philosophy and the immediate experience of real suffering. For me, though, it means something more — the moment when a person can no longer reconcile themselves with the world as it is. When they stop understanding the irrational, selfish, or cruel behaviour of others that mainstream society accepts as something normal.

It is a moment of complete solitude — when a person is left entirely alone with their perception of the world, finding understanding in nature, art, philosophy, or animals rather than among people themselves.

As a vegetarian, I have a very strong bond with animals. I often feel far more compassion for them than for people. Perhaps precisely because animals cannot hide their pain behind ideologies, ambition, or ego. Sometimes human behaviour stirs in me not only sadness but a deep incomprehension — a sense that I cannot identify with the direction society is taking.

That is also why I feel so close to a passage from Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, where Kundera writes of Nietzsche as someone who stepped off the road along which humankind, ‘the master and owner of nature’, marches onward.

I worked on the painting throughout 2025. During that year I lost several people close to me and found myself rethinking my own path. The world drifted further away at the same time — not over any single thing, more as a quiet realisation that I no longer understand it, and perhaps no longer want to. All that sadness, anger and helplessness finally ran together into a single canvas.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Years ago, I wrote him a letter as an admirer of his books. Almost as an afterthought, I included a few postcards with reproductions of my paintings. To my surprise, a kind reply soon arrived, encouraging me to write another letter — this time, I enclosed a small oil painting as well.

Gradually, we began exchanging our work: my paintings, collages, and linocuts for his newly published books, which always arrived ahead of release via his Czech publisher, along with a kind personal greeting from Milan Kundera himself.

One day, a letter arrived with a photograph of their Paris apartment — and in it, one of my paintings on the wall. Next to it hung something that looked familiar. After a moment, I realized it was a reproduction of the very painting that appeared on the cover of the first Czech edition of the novel that means the most to me, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (first published by the exile publishing house ’68 Publishers in 1985).

It was Kundera's favourite painting by the Czech surrealist Josef Istler (1919–2000) — one of the few things he took with him from Czechoslovakia into his French exile. Interestingly, in the very first copies of the Czech edition of the novel, the painting was accidentally printed upside down. And somewhat ironically, my own painting, too, occasionally hung upside down in Kundera's apartment by mistake — something that happens with more abstract works from time to time.

Later on, Mrs. Věra Kunderová would write or call every time a package with a new piece arrived in Paris. Her kind, touching words, often accompanied by photographs of their apartment, meant a great deal to me. Sometimes she even consulted me about where to hang my paintings.

She once told me, with a laugh, that their home had become completely "zalukášovanej" — thoroughly Lukáš-ified. I cannot imagine a greater honor.

It is hard to express what this experience meant to me. Milan Kundera's work has touched millions of people around the world, and the fact that he found a connection to my work as well was something immeasurably precious.

I still consider it the greatest honor of my artistic life. In harder times, it gave me strength and reminded me why creating is worthwhile. Nothing else has ever carried — or carries — more weight for me.

"For your beautiful picture, here's mine! M. K."

I share this story as a reminder of how art can connect people — and how unexpectedly it can bring joy and beauty into our lives. I am grateful for every moment my work becomes part of someone's home. And the fact that my art helped shape the atmosphere of the Kunderas' Paris apartment will forever remain an unsurpassable milestone for me.

DREAMS DRESSED IN BLUE

Over the years this piece has gone through a whole string of names. After a while it settled on DREAMS DRESSED IN BLUE — and I think it fits perfectly.

I usually don’t enjoy coming up with titles. Only rarely does a title crystallise together with the work; far more often I borrow them from the lyrics and titles of songs I listen to while working. This time too the title comes from a song — exceptionally, though, from one I wrote myself:

Last night I had a dream so vivid That I can hardly feel Whether by now I am still in it What if the things I did were real I set my fears afloat With my anxiety on hold There’s nothing but my body getting old I was swimming through the moonlight Drowning in cheap wine Since I’ve been stumbling over your eyes Everything seems fine So I’ve been trying not to make you think of going home And I’ve been trying to make the silence talk Before you turn to stone When your naked thighs Are trying inconspicuously To get in through my eyes All I can think of is who’s gonna feed the butterflies Living in your stomach While you’re gonna be too busy feeding me Oh, why I keep dreaming about you And why those dreams are dressed in blue Don’t I have better things to do Than dream of you All life long

This is one of the paintings I know for certain I’ll never sell — and at the same time the work I’m asked about more than any other. So as not to keep turning people away, I decided to have high-quality 1:1 reproductions made.

PARTY FOR ONE

This motif came to me on holiday in London, in 2019. I sketched it on the back of a receipt — and I knew at once it would turn into something. The subject wasn’t exactly unfamiliar to me, after all: I’m fond of wine, and I rarely stop at one glass.

I first worked it as a cut-out — one of three pieces from a loose series made over a few happy days in the autumn of 2019. The three are tied together by vivid, almost cheerful colours, rather untypical for me until then, and by a shared format, 297 × 420 mm.

It was on this trilogy that I put a name to something that had slipped into my work unconsciously and here took firmer shape: my figures are missing the parts of the body I don’t need for the story. When a figure has to do something with one hand, I don’t bother with the other. When it doesn’t need to stand on the ground, it has no legs. Minimalism in its most absolute form.

But the figure with the wine glass wouldn’t let go of me, and I wanted to get more out of it. First it became a small linocut — my New Year’s card for 2020.

Once I saw it worked in this graphic form too, I set about a larger linocut. That one I consider the definitive and finest form of this little figure.

I usually print my linocuts in numbered, limited editions. Here, though, I decided not to limit myself and to try different surfaces and materials — which is how the prints with various coloured backgrounds came about, along with the canvas tote bags for my side project, FOLLOW YOUR FART.

The View from Halfway Down

It was my favourite series that led me to this work — BoJack Horseman, and specifically its finale, which I consider an absolute peak of television and of the art of storytelling.

The show builds to a very dark close. Its penultimate episode unfolds entirely within a single near-death vision — a surreal dinner party where the main character meets again with loved ones who have died. It opens up heavy subjects: trauma, addiction, depression and death. And at the end, one of those departed characters recites the poem The View from Halfway Down.

— Alison Tafel, The View from Halfway Down (BoJack Horseman, 2020)

The finale genuinely hit me, and this poem — the inner monologue of someone who decides to end his life by jumping from a bridge — turned into a picture almost at once. First I set it down in my diary.

Soon after, I began work on a cut-out version. It proved far harder than I had expected — and certainly harder than the result might suggest. The whole image is just a black field, broken only by the stylised silhouette of a bridge and a falling figure.

Getting that falling figure right took so many attempts that I eventually assembled the discarded ones into a separate picture of their own.

In the end, I managed to create a figure whose proportions and gesture matched what I had in mind.

ON A TRIP

Few things shaped me as much as The Beatles. From the age of fourteen, when a genuine case of Beatlemania hit me, their influence seeped into absolutely everything I did.

I wanted to be like Paul McCartney. I took up the guitar, then piano, bass and drums, and started a band whose repertoire was largely made up of Beatles songs.

But it didn’t stop at music — the Beatles had an unprecedented effect on popular culture and on how people around the world thought and lived. I grew curious about why they didn’t eat meat and why Paul McCartney still campaigns for animal rights; that curiosity soon turned into a decision, and since 2010 (with one short break) I haven’t eaten animals. Their spiritual path fascinated me just as much; thanks to them I began meditating regularly, which helped me a great deal, even if I didn’t keep it up as faithfully as the vegetarianism.

Source: PETA · peta.org.uk

So their experiments with psychotropic substances couldn’t pass me by either — their psychedelic work after 1966 has never stopped fascinating me. That was exactly when the Beatles turned from a touring pop-rock band into an essentially studio creature: Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s are full of reversed loops, tape collage and unusual instruments, George Harrison brought Indian music and the sitar into their sound, and the lyrics filled up with dreamlike, surreal imagery. LSD wasn’t the only force behind that shift, but its imprint is very clearly audible in it.

Photo: The Beatles / Apple Corps Ltd.

Later, when we were shown a documentary series called Drugs and the Brain at secondary school — most likely meant to put us off drugs — I decided I would try LSD one day. (After the episode on nicotine I started smoking at seventeen, incidentally; the educational intent missed its mark entirely.) The effect of these substances on the brain fascinated me, and ever since I’ve been drawn to how the human mind works in general.

I spent a long time preparing for my first trip — I wanted my set and setting in order: my inner state and the surroundings the experience would happen in. Both largely decide which way it will go.

When the substance finally reached my hands for the first time, in September 2016, I was ready — but I hadn’t expected what it would do to me. I can clearly divide my life into before LSD and after LSD.

The first trip was wonderful. I was at home with a few good friends, in a good mood, and we had a marvellous time. I suddenly perceived the world completely differently — not the hallucinations one imagines, the way pop culture usually shows them; the truest depiction of that state I’ve seen is in my favourite horror film Midsommar, though there the trip is anything but pleasant.

Ever since adolescence, when I decided I’d try LSD, I had wanted to tie the experience to my work — and I tried it the very first time. In the dark, with my bare hands, I smeared paint across the canvas. The result was a picture I saw quite differently then than I do now (probably more because of the darkness than the LSD); it isn’t artistically interesting and I never put it in my portfolio, but it holds the value of that moment and that experience for me.

After that first successful experience I was charged up, full of euphoria — and determined to try again. Over the following months I did so many times, making plenty of drawings during each trip. That’s also why I’m sharing this experience at all.

In that altered state my hand moved across the paper differently — with a different force, a strange certainty, and terribly fast. The figures that came out of it had a different expression and look than anything I had made before.

I have dozens of those drawings, and over the years I’ve turned many of them into oil paintings, linocuts and cut-outs.

Most of the trips were pleasant and rewarding. I heard music on another level — I even saw it in colours; time would stop existing, or stopped flowing in a line. On holiday in the Netherlands I also tried psychedelic truffles. The grass and the trees then suddenly looked to me like living beings. The overall feelings, though, were no longer as pleasant, which showed in the mood of the sketches.

I experimented with these substances to expand my consciousness and to know myself. When I reached the point where I felt they were no longer giving me anything, I stopped.

My last trip is long behind me — well before COVID — and with that distance I can speak about it openly. I sometimes wonder how my life and work would have developed without this experience; it would certainly have been an enormous difference. Even though I haven’t taken any psychotropic substances for years, the experience is firmly woven into my hand, and I still draw on it — as if a gate had opened and activated connections that have stayed open ever since and shape my pictures to this day.

Note: This is a personal retrospective, not a guide or a recommendation. I haven’t used any psychoactive substances for years; I describe them only as part of my own path.

Nudes

One of the most recurring motifs in my work — almost from the very beginning — is the female body. I’ve always wanted to depict it with sensitivity and with the respect it deserves.

I won’t be sharing my very first attempts at the nude. Milan Kundera put into words something I try to follow as an author, which is why you won’t find anything in my portfolio from before 2016: “The smallest service an author can do for his works: to sweep around them.” That is — don’t let the failures out, and be clear about what holds up and what is still immature. Now, though, I’ll make an exception and show one of my first nudes — an oil painting I made at nineteen.

Over the years I’ve always returned to the nude with affection, trying to bring some playfulness and lightness into it.

Some works are more discreet, others more explicit. Sometimes I’ve admitted in the very title that, like any artist, I walk a thin line between admiration for the female body and a kind of leering — the male gaze; as in the work MALE GAZE (2022).

The beauty of the female body was a major theme in my physically largest work too, GREEK MYTHOLOGY IN BLUE (2023).

GREEK MYTHOLOGY took me a long time and a lot of effort; towards the end I wasn’t enjoying the work much, and once it was done I wanted something lighter and gentler — so, without much deliberation, I reached for the nude again. In quick succession came RHAPSODY IN BLUE (2023) and THE BLUE NAVEL (2023), which is probably my favourite nude of all.

I later reworked the motif loosely as a small sculpture, too.

I expect this theme won’t leave me any time soon, and that I’ll gradually add more works celebrating the beauty of the human body.

Greek Mythology in Blue

Greek Mythology in Blue is a paper-cut composition measuring 250 × 53 cm that unfolds as a single horizontal narrative.

On the left, Sisyphus rolls an immense boulder up the hill. The gods condemned him to a task that can never be completed — every time he nears the top, the boulder rolls back down. And that is precisely the power of this image: Sisyphus is each of us. Every morning we rise to the same duties, to work that never ends, to efforts whose results dissolve overnight. The question is not how to get the boulder to the top, but how to roll it with dignity.

Beside him kneels Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, with a white dove — the bird sacred to her in the ancient tradition.

The center of the composition belongs to the story of Leda and the swan. According to the myth, Zeus took the form of a swan to approach and seduce Leda. She then laid eggs from which mythical figures were born — among them Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world. She was later abducted by the Trojan prince Paris, and her abduction became the immediate cause of the Trojan War.

Another figure of this world is Prometheus, the Titan who brought fire to humankind against the will of the gods. For his deed he was punished by Zeus: chained to a rock in the Caucasus, where an eagle flies to him every day to peck out his liver. Overnight the liver grows back, and the next day the torment repeats — a punishment as endless as Sisyphus's labor.

In Greek Mythology in Blue, the individual motifs do not form separate episodes but flow together into one continuous horizontal whole. The work functions as an allegory of the human condition, returning to the themes of fate, love, power, and the consequences of human and divine action.

Où va le monde ?

“Où va le monde ?” — “Where is the world going?” in English — is a meditation on the uncertainty that connects us all.

I borrowed the title from the song of the same name by the French band La Femme.

Two faces in profile, close together, intently watching the central element: a small point of light. In one reading it’s a symbol of our planet — the Earth as a focal point of shared concern and reflection.

Seen another way, that same point turns into an eye. Each face is shown in profile, so we see only one of its eyes; the point sits exactly between them, giving each face precisely the eye it’s missing in profile — and yet both faces share it.

There’s unease in both faces, bordering on dread. The world they watch is not a matter of indifference to them — it holds them close and unsettles them at once.

I sketched this motif in my diary on a day when I felt exactly the dread that’s in those faces — that day a burst water pipe flooded my whole flat and leaked down to the neighbours below me, and on top of that came the strictest covid lockdown: everything was closed, and in the evenings you couldn’t even go outside.

The cut-out, by contrast, I made during one of my happiest stretches, in the spring of 2021 — it came quickly and smoothly, over a single evening. But I didn’t want to stop there; shortly afterwards I turned the motif into a linocut as well (only 6 numbered prints).

That still wasn’t enough for me, so I cut another, this time larger and in negative: what was black in the cut-out and the first linocut is now white paper — and the other way round. I then experimented with the printing, trying various materials including mirror paper and canvas tote bags.