Milan Kunc

Milan Kunc (*1944) was trained during the Soviet era and took part in the Prague spring uprising of 1968, before moving to the non-Communist West and living through the societal upheavals that shook it. At the end of the 1960s, as Yves Aupetitallot writes, "he had direct experience of two systems of viewing the world, each claiming to work toward the building of a social utopia whose foundations were nurtured by a dialectic opposition to the basis of the other system. In his journey through that double political and social geography, looking beyond a differentiated ideological framework and ultimate destination, he noted the same recourse to the universal language of kitsch. The proletariat of the whole world had apparently become consumers of the whole world."
Kunc produced his first known works in 1968, in which he combined objects and images borrowed from the symbols and imagery of Communism—the red flag, the sickle, and the hammer. Since then his work has primarily been as a painter. His painting is figurative, with an ostentatiously smooth technique. His subjects are constructed using a collection of images of various provenances that mainly fall into three categories: the icons of Western consumerist culture, such as Coca-Cola or McDonald's; Socialist Realism; and the masterpieces of classical painting. He combines these with modernist procedures coming from photomontage, photo-collage, and collage, as well as experimentations with ceramics since the early 1970s.