Vít V. Pavlík (born 1976 in Volary) is a prominent figure in the contemporary Czech art scene, whose work organically merges painterly tradition with a conceptual approach to image and space. His artistic trajectory, which has unfolded since the late 1990s, is marked by a profound connection to the landscape of South Bohemia, particularly the Šumava (Bohemian Forest) region, which has become not only a motif but also an existential and philosophical point of departure.
Pavlík graduated from the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice, where he earned a master’s degree, and since 1999 he has actively contributed to shaping both regional and international art scenes. He is the founder of the artistic movement Volarism, whose philosophy stems from the genius loci of his hometown and reflects the relationship between humanity, nature, and cultural memory. As chairman of the Association of South Bohemian Visual Artists and director of the Elementary Art School in Volary, he is involved not only in his own artistic practice but also in pedagogical and curatorial activities that significantly influence the cultural life of the region.
His works have been presented at more than 150 exhibitions in the Czech Republic and abroad – in Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Slovenia, Slovakia, North Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, Belgium, the United States, and Japan. Among the most significant presentations are exhibitions at the headquarters of the European Parliament in Brussels, at the Czech Republic embassies in Paris and Vienna, at the US Embassy in Prague, as well as participation in the prestigious Salon d’automne in Paris and the Biennial of Contemporary Arts in New York. These international platforms confirm not only the quality and originality of his work but also his ability to communicate through visual language across cultural contexts.
He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Germany Award in a fine arts competition (1993), the Junge Kunst Award (2006), and the Award for Contribution to Painting at the V4 Biennale (2006). His works are represented in private and public collections and have become part of cultural heritage.
Pavlík’s work is characterized by a sensitive handling of the medium of painting and drawing, often working with layering of colors, textures, and symbols that refer to both personal and collective memory. His paintings are not mere representations of landscape but rather attempts to capture the transience, silence, and transcendence that we find in nature. His works resonate with the legacy of Central European painterly tradition while simultaneously opening up to contemporary questions of identity, place, and the meaning of art in today’s globalized society.
The curatorial text for Vít Pavlík’s exhibition is also an invitation to pause – to observe, meditate, and engage in dialogue with the image, which brings us back to the fundamental questions of human existence: Where are we? Where do we belong? And what will remain after us?
In Prague, June 14, 2025 Doc. Irena Mádlová alias Bohoušek Rettů
We have been encountering the name of Vít V. Pavlík on the European art scene for more than twenty years. Numerous exhibitions in the Czech Republic, North Macedonian Skopje, repeatedly in Italian Tuscany, Moldovan Chișinău, Romanian Bucharest, exhibitions in Poland, Slovakia, a whole long series of events in Germany and Austria, USA, Brussels…and these are far from all of Pavlík’s solo or collective exhibitions, with him participating in the preparation of some or preparing them himself. A native of Volary in the Šumava region, he studied art pedagogy at the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice and soon became known for his distinctive artistic concept, which combines sometimes even explosive use of color in dynamic forms across the entire format scale. In his emotionally powerful paintings, it is clearly primarily about searching for the lost harmony between man and nature, to which the author is so close. Pavlík does not limit himself in his work to classic brush painting on canvas, but over the years the range of substrates he uses has expanded not only to include stone slabs and cardboard, but also, for example, the surfaces of motor vehicles. And there he fully utilizes decades of his experience and develops a distinctive, very bold and unique haptic style in action painting: stencils, sprays, spatulas, fingers, brushes—the boundaries seem not to be fixed, and we shall see where he will move in the future. Vít V. Pavlík is also among the leading Czech so-called projection photographers. The nude female body with colored transparencies has no parallel in photographic literature. A long-time chairman of the Association of South Bohemian Artists, long-time director of the Volary Art School, curator, organizer, publicist, rhetorician, artistic experimenter and innovator—he has already achieved numerous domestic and international awards, but I am certain that his creative potential will not wane; on the contrary, the best wine comes last!
In Prague, May 1, 2024 Doc. Irena Mádlová alias Bohoušek Rettů
Art for All the Senses
I believe it was Marc Chagall who once said that art is above all a state of the soul. Well, if that is true, then the soul of Vít V. Pavlík is restless, “free-spirited”, and at times even elusive — yet at the same time rational and enquiring. Simply put, in this case too the soul follows its creator and his artistic scope, which is broad. It crosses through various fields of art, seeking mutual influences and communicative values — it is cross art. Vít’s ambitions are by no means confined within the classical space of a picture frame or a photograph, although in the same breath it must be said that these very artistic disciplines represent an important form of his expression. Yet even here one senses a reaching beyond the defined surface — a stepping out towards the viewer and an invitation to take a walk where anything can happen.
Vít comes from the Šumava region, from the village of Volary, and this is perceptible in his paintings. They contain experiences drawn from the surrounding nature, elegantly transferred onto the pictorial surface. At times he paints with energetic impulsiveness, at other times with rational deliberation — but always with heart, with artistic sensitivity, and above all, for us. One moment it is the sweep of a hand leaving a vivid trail of colour; the next, a detail captures attention — an awareness of the small yet important elements that together form the whole. His acrylics also reveal an architectural compositional quality, structures that speak of a firm compositional arrangement. The musical thread running through his works is certainly no coincidence — the presence of his wife Kateřina, an accomplished musician, is palpable. Yet Vít’s artistic scores are entirely his own and unrepeatable. They are not catchy radio jingles, but an original alternative — much like the performance of Saxpower. Music is also perceptible in his photographs — whether in the motif of a Fender guitar (Stratocaster) or a classical Spanish guitar. Naturally, the central figure is a beautiful woman — yet she in turn serves as a metaphor for tones, as alluring as the female form itself. The large formats are sensuous traces of our desires.
It was no coincidence that I mentioned Marc Chagall at the outset. Vít Pavlík, too, is a classicist — yet one who conducts his artistic language through territories that are not merely the traditional “domain of sight”, but are addressed to all the senses. I am glad to have had the opportunity to meet Vít on several occasions and to have organised his first exhibition in Bratislava. His art is, after all, also my own state of the soul. It is for this reason that I believe we still have many shared moments of enrichment ahead of us.
In Bratislava, June 2010, PhDr. Ľudovít Petránsky, Jr.
Excerpt from the Junge Kunst catalogue
The unceasing murmur of deep forests and the abundance of waters gave the vast forested mountain range its name. The Šumava (Bohemian Forest) is the heart of a woodland that stretches from the Fichtelgebirge mountains in the north to the Upper Austrian Mühlviertel. This region and its people have from time immemorial been tormented and torn apart by wars waged over power and faith. Economic and cultural flourishing in the Middle Ages and a golden age under the Habsburgs. Timber succumbed to seemingly endless felling; glassmaking and mining were once sources of great wealth. Goods were transported along ancient trade routes — the most famous of which is the “Golden Trail” from Passau to Prachatice — even in times of war and hardship. It was the “Iron Curtain” that finally severed these age-old ties. Today it is once again possible — not only from the summits of Javor, Rachel, Luzný or Trojmezná — to gaze out over the Šumava; today one can once again walk these trails into endless forests, mysterious peat bogs and meadows, through a landscape that has since time immemorial been a source of rich inspiration. We have long since found ourselves within the paintings of Vít Vavřinec Pavlík; we have long since encountered the myths that inspired Bohumil Hrabal, Karel Čapek, Josef Holub, Adalbert Stifter and Karel Klostermann in their literary works. What they rendered with such objectivity and vitality permeates the drawings and, in part, the monumental works of an artist who has found his own handwriting for his personal memories — a script with which he is able to transfer his inner states of mind onto paper or canvas in encoded form. The point of departure is an intimate knowledge of the environment. Vít Pavlík was born in 1976 in Volary. As chairman of the Association of South Bohemian Visual Artists, he is keenly aware of his source of inspiration and seeks it in the Šumava — a pursuit to which he was already led by his grandfather and father, both active in the visual arts. “From childhood I grew up surrounded by the beauty of painted expression, which eventually spoke to me as well. Into my paintings I place my memories, my momentary feelings, but also fragments of the distinctive character of the Šumava landscape.” He has freed himself from objective representation, yet in his paintings we find the completeness of a distinctive landscape. Emotion forcefully carves its way through the dynamic stroke of the brush. Eruptive outbursts symbolise the power of nature, which continuously reigns over his homeland. And yet the language of forms resounds in a directly poetic manner. The interplay of bold and delicate lines — verticals, diagonals, horizontals — woven together into geometric figures gives rise to a world in motion, in which nature becomes a rhythm that sets the tone. Moving lines and expressive areas of colour generate compositions that feel both geometric and figurative. No conventional, traditional pictorial structure is discernible, yet a single title suffices for us to imagine birds, flowers, people — all that is living and non-living in nature. Turmoil, fragmentation, and decay are in nature always merely transient phenomena. They are part of the cycle of life, of being and of passing away. This artist, who teaches specialist art education, has built his empire in former cellars. In his cave-like world he gives form to runes of an almost archaic power. Rounded and angular shapes do not contradict one another. The spatial composition of the terrain and the structured differentiation of layered profiles — the abstraction of forms interweaves with shapes to culminate in a fusion of the constructive with the artistic. The picture becomes a fiction that continually retains the possibility of returning from abstraction to objecthood. The pictorial expression here can be interpreted either as an extreme stylisation of a naturalistic landscape, or as an inner landscape that finds its expression in a simple, expressive immediacy. “Throughout my entire painting career I have been attempting to create the ideal picture. I know it is a lifelong process. Each time the picture is different — but that is precisely what motivates me not to stagnate.” Despite his young age, the painter has already penetrated deeply into the world of modernism. He has freed himself from the Czech school of Surrealism and Cubism, yet he does not conceal his origins. Pencil and brush leave “isms” behind; they become powerful machetes cutting through the thicket and the deceptive false paths of the 20th century. Abstraction is meant to work emotionally, to create visual intensity. Shafts of light emerge. In an era in which a tangle of colours and everyday images blinds and overwhelms the viewer, this painting is a school of seeing — one that, in its clear, rhetoric-free complexity, is capable of revitalising the limited functionality of our vision. It trains the concentration of the gaze and enriches our world of experience both in terms of colour and form. It enables the vitalisation of all our senses and directs the reflection of optical perception inward, allowing us to become aware once again of the structures of the subconscious, and thus reminds us of the richness of creation and the creative world. “These are not classical pictures of snow-covered landscapes — but even these elements the attentive observer will find in my work.” How true: this self-assured, purposeful, and yet modestly appearing young man discovers the water music of the Vydra river, the solitude of the bogs surrounding it, the forest solitude of the floodplain meadows along the Vltava, and the testimony of the Ice Age at Plešné jezero. The observer comes to recognise unknown “Bohemian villages”. Just as the Bavarian Forest and the Šumava merge into the “Green Roof of Europe”, so in the painterly language of Vít Pavlík East and West draw closer together, and here and there are joined into a single whole — into a “murmuring” world of images.
In Passau, February, 2006, Dr. Stefan Rammer