Profile of the Adam Gallery collection

The Adam Gallery collection purposefully focusses on young art starting from the 1980s to the present. It also covers painters linked to the 1960s and 1970s (Václav Boštík, Dalibor Chatrný, Zdeněk Sýkora, Karel Malich, Jiří Sopko, Jiří Načeradský) but they do not represent the core of the collection. On the one hand, obtaining works by these classic representatives of Czech modern art is ever more complicated and, in addition, numerous key works are not available any more. As regards contemporary art, the situation is, on the contrary, very open. Richard Adam started to buy pictures in the 1980s and these can be regarded as an imaginary beginning of the collection. It includes artists from the Tvrdohlaví (Stubborn Ones) group (Jiří David, Stanislav Diviš, Petr Nikl, Jaroslav Róna) and their surroundings (Vladimír Kokolia, Antonín Střížek, Tomáš Císařovský, Jiří Kovanda, Jan Merta, Vladimír Skrepl, Václav Stratil and others). They are associated with the onset of postmodernism and the rehabilitation of painting, which replaced the previous, widespread conceptual approaches. With them, Czech fine art starts to recover after the totalitarian period of controlled and suppressed art production. 
The unifying principle of postmodernism gradually disintegrates in the 1990s and art starts to differentiate, the idea of the linear development of art disappears. New technologies, videos and installations arrive. However, Richard Adam remains faithful to painting. He follows the art production of newly established groups (Monday, 1989–2003; Headless Horseman, 1996–2002, Rafani, from 2000) but considers individual production, which he monitors and carefully selects, to be more important. Both various forms of abstraction (Petr Pastrňák, Jiří Černický, Ivan Vosecký) and new approaches to depictive painting (Josef Bolf, Michal Pěchounek, Milan Salák, Vít Soukup) are represented in it. In addition, Adam completes his collection with returns and transformations of the neo-avantgarde, experimental procedures and new conceptual painting (Evžen Šimera); form is not important, the main selection criterion being the quality. At present, the scope and diversity of approaches seems to be even greater as the distance from the works being created is minimal or virtually none. However, Richard Adam disregards the saying that "time will prove everything" and keeps focussing on whatever is new and upcoming. It should be appreciated that Adam does not limit himself to only one style of young painting but maintains the full range of its various forms. Consequently, the collection preserves its characteristic diversity and openness also in the case of works from the early 21st century.