After primary school in Liberec, Merta studied at the Václav Hollar Art School in Prague, but his family background prevented him from gaining admission to one of Prague's art academies. He worked at a series of unskilled and manual jobs, and finally in 1981 was accepted at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Memories of the house in Liberec, of family life, school days and of becoming aware of the world from the perspective of a nascent artist are all dealt with in these works.
The centerpiece of the show, a monumental semi-abstract painting that depicts the time and place where Merta's boyhood conception of God coalesced, is titled A Lesson in Pantheism. It recalls the questioning of schoolmates about whether God's omnipresence extended to the gutter urinal of the boys' room or to inside a classmate's mouth, to which the artist answered "Yes." The painting is composed from the perspective of the urinating boys, while an enormous shadowy penis looms over the asphalt-cover wall of the toilets, presumably another signal of God's pervasive presence.
Alongside Merta's developing conceptions about theology and aesthetics, he was exposed to the carnal side of life. Regarding Gallery I-IV, four small canvases featuring female figures in autoerotic poses and one copulating couple, he writes, "I was regarded as a painter already at school. When I was 10, two worldly schoolmates of mine offered one day to take me to a gallery. … We came to a hole in a fence around an open-air cinema … [where] I saw a number of life-size figures. Somebody had drawn them meticulously in soft red brick, with some touches in white chalk. It was pure pornography. I suffered a shock. … I was equally shocked by the perfection of the execution. … It was as if I had seen a Giotto."
Merta has been making paintings reflecting on childhood memories since the 1980s. This is the third exhibition devoted to formative moments of his boyhood in Liberec, and there are plans for further exhibitions to follow. His strong body of work blends large paintings with small, intimate canvases, earth-shaking moments of comprehension with amusing anecdotes and visual snapshots. Whether thematically grand or not, the paintings as a group consistently demonstrate his excellent handling of paint, strong compositional sense and use of color.
The paintings journey back to the time when Merta began to view the world not only as a perceptive and sensitive boy but through the eyes of a budding artist. The best paintings in the show strongly evoke the light-bulb moments that, in retrospect, paved Merta's path to becoming a painter. What did he sense in Rembrandt's gaze that so deeply affected him as a young boy? Perhaps it was a feeling of being "seen" by the seemingly all-knowing eyes of the artist, yet which were also filled with compassion, something akin to his early conception of God.
Even in his most abstract paintings, Merta links back to direct human experience, such as in Oil Wainscoting III, which recalls the smell of paint being mixed by his father to complete a passage of illusory wainscoting in their Liberec home.
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