The Ingram Collection recently purchased two oil paintings by Miroslav Pomichal, an artist who has just graduated from Wimbledon School of Art. Miroslav has just exhibited at the Bloomberg New Contemporaries Show at the Liverpool Biennal and at the Saatchi New Sensations show in London.
We recently spoke to Miroslav about what he’s been up to since graduating this Summer, and the two paintings bought by The Ingram Collection:
“The Degree Show was stressful business, but of course finally satisfying; I only made little work in the run up to it, having made my main two paintings some months before. It was a blessing, since organizing the show alone was a big challenge.
So after the exhibition I left for rural Slovakia, where my parents live at the moment and where I have a studio in a barn. For me summer always means an endless, burning expanse of time and space, where gestures of freedom as well as luxurious indolence collide – the habits of childhood.
My main work was the two paintings now acquired by the Ingram Collection – they really are an attempt at a lyrical approach to confronting the myth of summer, and its deceptive opportunity to live in the pleasant loins of nature for a time. The works are loosely based on a small woodcut by Max Pechstein.
The rest of summer was spent reading and walking. I like to read forgotten books on subjects which interest me – like Russian icon painting, or Czech medieval poetry, or original artist’s letters. There is such density, and self-conscious historicity, in the European cultural experience. I have difficulty in digesting this density, allow it to work itself into my practice, and yet refine, distil, and simplify it. Which sounds terribly like the pursuits of alchemists in Rudolphine Prague.
Being part of the Ingram Collection is very exciting for me, for two reasons. What the collection contains, and what it stands for. There should be more places like this, private, yet open to the public, and for its benefit”.
Miroslav Pomichal, October 2014
Bather I
Bather II