Michael Horsky
* 1973
Born in Prague in 1973, Michael Horsky studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in the classes of Wolfgang Hollegha and Hubert Schmalix. He lives and works in Vienna.
… Kafka Asks Buddha …
The large canvas is covered with a kind of floral cubism.
The chains of motifs are intertwined like horsetail ferns, merging like fungal cultures beneath the forest floor. In a manner similar to a relief running around an East-Asian temple that has absorbed the color and odor of bodies, fabrics, animals and drugs.
Nipples reminiscent of pairs of eyes appear as stop signs, the vagina as a wound, and drooping penises like baldachins. In the few blank pictorial zones, bunnies assume the colors of the Easter eggs they are hiding.Rows of teeth recur in toes, and fingers turn into tufts of hair.
Often the main motif slips beneath the secondary motifs, which, in turn, break through the former like sprouting seeds – mostly in a line-like arrangement, kaleidoscopically or in zones.
Arrogance, sarcasm or craving for admiration are never present in this rather “strange” pictorial language. Over the long period of their creation, the pictures have become humane and are the product of great passion.
Despite constant repainting, the slightly broken chromatic colors (with a high share of yellow, pink and blue) seem to be immune to graying and obfuscation. Also striking is the absence of earth tones. The artistic coloration is devoid of naturalism, lending the colors an almost liturgical character and producing clichés with renewed credibility.
Self-portraits in various emotional states, reminiscent of those of Arnold Schoenberg, react to genetically modified rabbits and “exhausted” body fragments and yet remain logical from a creative point of view because, like a swinging fun-house mirror, the distorted surface permits these different pictorial elements to “get along well with one another” …
The prerequisite is a sophisticated system of arrangement in which vanishing point and chromatic perspective are allowed no space. Space is created instead by the repetition of motifs – comparable to echoes in music, and, perhaps, also to the Egyptian and Minoan pictorial language. This extremely varied use of emblematic imagery allows Michi, as a deeply devoted painter, to say things that have never been said in this way before.
Siegfried Anzinger
Cologne, June 5th 2018