ARTIST STATEMENT
I've always liked to look at pictures in magazines and not even read the text much. I looked at the picture and made up my own story to go with it. Or I was just switching TV channels and being entertained by a piece of the story out of context. I admired the torn posters on the streets. I watched people and wondered where they were going, what they were thinking. And when I started making collages, I actually just picked up all off that (magazine pictures, memories, stories and feelings) and cut and glued it together.
When a collage is being made, I have an idea of what it should look like, but sometimes it kind of starts to live a life of its own and I get different images under my scissors than I was looking for and I realize that they're actually a much better choice than the ones I was searching for. The randomness that goes into the creation is just another fun element to my playfulness.
My friend Jarmila Kudláčková wrote about me:
I´m just playing, says Martin Došek with mysterious smile, which advises and bears to herewith his aversion to comment his production anyway. All the more he evokes the parallel with dutch painter, Hieronymus Bosch, who is indicated as a surrealist of the 15th century. Došek sticks his collages one by one with no less urgent memento, the same way as Bosch didn´t let anyone introspect into his inward, and disgorged pictures, presented the magic of the Middle Ages (with everything, what it meant), with crudeness, heading to the bone. Defile of women or girls on his collages, or more precisely their absolut adoration (pious veneration, not worship), with total absence of men (except of the holy ones), whose phallic presence is limited just to quizzical plumy creatures, evokes escapement into the false Eden, which has to lead along destruction of humankind. Surrealism is fortunately an avant-garde artistic direction, which has nothing in common with conventional logic schemes, and is plunging us in fantastic images and dreams. The power of Došek´s minimalist collages subsists in the fact, that we easily believe him, that Saint Sebastian was stabbed to the death by some courtesan during a ride in a limousine, or that a unicorn is a hairy blonde girl, indeed. The sins of the humankind have nowise fallen since the Middle Ages, vice versa maybe, the Last Judgment is still far from it. Maybe just a bizarre combination of dream and reality, life and death enables us to survive the unsurviveable.
ARTIST BIO
Martin Došek, born 8. 4. 1967 in Pardubice, Czech Republic
I make my collages by hand, from old newspapers with scissors, glue, pencil and paints. I have been doing it for over 30 years and iťs still fun for me and a great fantasy adventure. I enjoy the lightness with which anything can be composed, at the same time creating stories that I think up. Tearing and cutting old newspapers and magazines into pieces and returning all these beautiful pictures to the world, to a new life and in new contexts.