A masterful contemporary painter and printmaker, Miroslav Pomichal lives and works in London and Slovakia. The artist’s impressive oeuvre is distinguished by a sculptural treatment of the picture plane. Architectonic impasto like gestural forms translate into cubic expressiveness reminding one of the work of artists like Philip Guston as well as classic forms of modernism such as Russian Constructivism, Cubism and the gothic armature, broken lines and kinetic energies of German Expressionism. A highly collectible contemporary artist, Pomichal was selected for the 2014 Saatchi New Sensations exhibit and his work is found in the Ingram Collection of Modern British Art as well as select private collections.
The painter often returns to rural Slovakia to find aesthetic inspiration. In an extensive body of both graphic and canvas work, Pomichal’s accomplished vision of structure, form and colour are a network of pictorial symbols laid out in a complex and robust style.
In the various series of paintings depicting emblematic symbols, landscape, urban vignettes, and scenes of conflict, black lines crisscross the surface of each picture, allowing a sense of disruptive narrative. Abstraction is interspersed with the use of myopic symbolism, a trope of Expressionist painting concerned with the issues and tragedies of modern life, and particularly the tragedies of war. The monumentally concrete armature of the legacy of Expressionism is punctuated dramatically by a sense of dramatic storytelling and a commitment to the spiritual side of humankind as well.
The artist also works in prints and recently collaborated on a book entitled The Picture Book of Ehrenfried of Entenbeurgh with the Invisible Print Studio, telling the story of a philosopher vagrant, and revealing the artist’s interest in what he calls “the gothic impulse…. laced with unreason, inter-connectedness, hypertension, anxiety, and feebleness of excess. The essence of ‘the Gothic impulse’ is schismatic and blasphemous, as well as anagogical and divine.”
Rosa JH Berland
