Tomáš Císařovský

“Back then, in eighty-seven or eight, my friends and I went to the pub at Ladronka in Smíchov. The Charter convention was there, and we were there too. My friend looked out of the window and noticed the Antons [prison vans - trans.] arrive. We were both at the Academy at the time. He nudged me, suggested jumping out of the window, so we wouldn’t get into trouble at school. So we jumped out of the window. But they were ready for us, of course, and they shoved us straight into the Antons. That was one of the longest and really ugly moments, when they kept endlessly dialing the Academy number, but luckily they couldn’t get through to the rector. They said that either we tell them who informed us of the meeting and what we were doing there, or our rector would get some really interesting news.”

“We found our themes ourselves. There were foundations, of course. Figure drawing, portraits, nudes, still lifes, loose compositions. You could put an awful lot into that. But basically we were in a schizophrenic situation, where you completed these tasks as a breeze, just to fulfil the bare minimum, and you saved ninety per cent of your time to do what you wanted to. What you considered necessary. Because by then we could hear the growing echoes of the new artistic direction pushing its way through Western Europe and America. We called it the New Wave. It appealed to us a lot. In fact, it was the reason why my colleagues and I got together and formed some kind of generational core. We started searching for options of how to confront each other, to display our works and show them to other people who might be interested as well.”