Bottle, Fruit, and Figure c. 1964 - 1968

Jirí Balcar made this print, Bottle, Fruit, and Figure, with an intuitive hand, though I don’t know when. The marks are subtle and layered; the color palette is muted, mostly pinks and grays, with outlines describing figures and bottles and floating letterforms. I imagine Balcar, in his studio, perhaps in the early morning, layering image on image in a semi-abstract, semi-representational way. You can see the textures – the way the ink sits on the paper. There's a gestural, searching quality here, like automatic writing or sketching. The overlaying of images makes me think that this could be a lithograph – you can achieve these qualities using a greasy crayon on a litho stone. It reminds me a little bit of Kurt Schwitters' collages, or maybe some of Rauschenberg's combines. Artists like this are always in conversation, each one building on what came before, pushing the boundaries, inspiring new ways of seeing and thinking about the world. Painting is an embodied expression, and this print really shows that: messy, imperfect, and open to interpretation.