The Noughties Generation

If the previous decade's painting lacked some sort of unifying feature, this is even truer for the works of art of the early 21st century. It is determined by both the wide scope of the contemporary painting and the almost zero distance from current affairs. Generally, contemporary works of art are characterized by their exceeding the boundaries of individual types of art, their mingling, overlaps into the social area or conceptual activities. However, Richard Adam remains faithful to painting, in which he looks for originality of expression. He finds new impulses also in the traditional artistic form of the picture. He focusses on the medium of painting, the search for new layers of meaning, which is best demonstrated by the current works by Jiří Černický. Other painters whose works Adam added to his collection paraphrase various forms of abstraction (for instance, Daniel Hanvald, Karel Štědrý, Josef Achrer), create abstracted variations on old paintings (Luděk Rathouský), continue the conceptualization of painting (Evžen Šimera), try out the possibilities of intermingling painting and drawing (Dana Sahánková), picture and assemblage (Václav Girsa), and use the language of street art (Jakub Matuška), etc. Although these forms of contemporary painting from Richard Adam's collection were exhibited in 2011, it is probably too early to make any general statements about the style and ideas of this decade and it will only be possible to formulate them later.
It is worth noting that in his collection Richard Adam did not stop with the 1980s generation but in his passionate search for new forms of image he moves to ever younger artists, whom he also finds among the students of the Academy of Fine Arts. He does not limit himself to only one selected style of painting but explores the current style of painting in its full range. His interest goes from "cold" conceptual abstraction to painting reductionism or minimalism, to subjective, fine art expression or grotesque figuration. At the same time, his collection shows "one eye" from the very beginning, which means it is in no way a complicatedly balanced museum collection artificially attempting to achieve an objective picture but rather a snapshot of Czech contemporary painting based on a single distinctive perspective. The question is not only the number of works of art, which regarding the present financing of public galleries cannot compete with the numbers they can procure, but in particular the comprehensiveness and logic of the whole collection. This feature is perhaps even more valuable than the unprecedented scope of the Czech painting collection of the past thirty years.