Milan Kunc is one of the prominent figures in art of the second half of the twentieth century, whose work is represented in many important public and private collections worldwide. Since the 1970s, he has been developing a distinctive visual language that blends pop-cultural aesthetics, irony, surrealist imagination, and a sensitive reflection of societal changes.
Painting, sculpture, installation, and performance in his work become a means of observing a world where everyday life meets absurdity, humor meets criticism, and personal experience meets collective memory. Kunc connects symbols of East and West, high and popular culture, without hierarchizing them. It is this ability to combine seemingly incompatible worlds that makes his work exceptionally relevant even in today's geopolitical and social context.
The Pop Renaissance exhibition presents a selection of works from the 1980s alongside contemporary paintings that draw from this period or develop motifs captured in the artist's drawings from that time. The 1980s represent an exceptionally prolific period in Kunc's work, shaped by life between New York, Los Angeles, and Europe, where he worked in Rome, Milan, Cologne, and Holland. It was then that works were created that became part of important world collections and defined his unique artistic signature.
In these works, spontaneous painterly gestures alternate with precisely constructed compositions, pop-cultural references intertwine with surrealist imagery, and everyday motifs acquire archetypal meaning. Although many of the works were created more than forty years ago, their themes – consumerism, the power of images, ideology, identity, and humanity's relationship with nature – remain surprisingly current.
The exhibition offers a glimpse into an artist who has been creating a distinctive image of the contemporary world for decades. His work is not merely a testament to one era, but an open dialogue with the present, in which humor becomes a tool for critical thinking and painting a space for free imagination.
Curator: Filip Kazda
Work in preview
Am Rande der Verzweifelung, 1982
On the Edge of Despair
acrylic, dispersion on canvas
COLLETT Prague | Munich
Photo: Milan Havel
Milan Kunc – Pop Renaissance
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