White & Weiss Gallery opens its autumn season with an exhibition of Milan Houser, major Czech artist. The exhibition is curated by Vladimír Beskid.

Milan Houser’s primary and lasting focus is abstract painting intertwined with object work. He explores all basic material components of painting, such as the canvas, frame, paint and its application on the base. He experiments with them physically and chemically to thematize the painting in its material and object essence. His long use of industrial materials and technologies makes his relationship to painting quite non-painterly. He constantly refines a relatively narrow range of selected formal techniques. Most recently he reaches for coloured varnish that he has specially made and mixed with pigments, dyes and metals. He works in large non-narrative series to encompass and refine all the formal practices he explores. Houser experiments with the optical properties of materials. Some paintings, for instance, glow in the dark, create virtually deceptive optical depth or stand out from the canvas in multiple ways. Central theme of his work is the fascination with physical properties of the material world, along with the possibilities of seeing and perceiving it. In addition to painting, Houser is also an object maker. He has made permanent and temporary works in public space. Currently, he has also embraced glass sculpture and graphic letters as media he works with.

The current series of paintings Mirrors from 2022 is in the centre of the LEVEL project. These painterly bathtub-like objects bring a new level of painting, the phenomenon of mirroring and the manifestation of colour in space. The series is complemented by centred circular formats – the eyes of the painting. These are monochromatic picture fields, created by various metallic particles added to coloured paint. Their allergic reaction creates the textures idiosyncratic to the painting. The exhibition runs until 13 October.

Milan Houser (b. 1971) is lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Brno University of Technology, where he leads the Department of Traditional Media. His works are included in Czech and international public and private collections, inter alia, the Collection of Contemporary and Modern Art of the National Gallery Prague, the collection of the GJK in Trnava, the Brno City Museum.