Vernissage of paintings by Martin Šárovec – POP HEROES

Why do people need their heroes? Why do people want to become heroes? The symbol of heroism as a proxy for a certain pattern of behaviour has been around since time immemorial. However, over the last 70 years, due to the influence of multimedia culture, heroes have arisen or disappeared in monstrous giganticism, many of which we cannot perceive, inspiring and absorbing each other at the same time. It is a vast universe, which often evokes in us and in the heroes themselves a sense of futility, frustration, irreversible temporality. The heroes are stars in an infinite cosmos, with varying lifespans.
If success comes and a star shines in a sea of pop icons, how long will it be visible? What will they have to do, what will they have to sacrifice? Will she be truly happy then? Will she not become a parody of herself? Isn’t her rhythm of life destructive to her and to others? Doesn’t she sometimes become a kind of visual and omnipresent “monster” even though she is beautiful and ethereally charismatic?

Martin Šárovec (1977) is a contemporary Czech painter, a graduate of DAMU and VŠUP. His painting combines two traditions: it is based on the Czech expressionist school of the early 20th century and enriches it with a distinctive reflection of the so-called Czech grotesque of the 1970s and 1980s. Šárovc’s distinctive motif is the human face and its critical and even frightening forms mirroring the postmodern media society of the 21st century. The artist has more than forty solo and collective exhibitions to his credit. He participated in the International Triennial of Contemporary Art 2008 organized by the National Gallery in Prague. His work is represented in the Felix Jenewein Gallery in Kutná Hora and in numerous private collections.