Jan Jakub Kotík - Forces of Resistance

 The work of Jan J. Kotík – an artist of American origin with Czech roots – has been viewed primarily within the context of political engagement. After completing his studies at the studio of Hans Haacke at Cooper Union,
New York and a short period in NYC, Kotík has relocated to Prague where he acquired his recognition as an artist. An influence of the American environment where he grew up and completed his studies remained a strong influence in his work. The need to scrutinize and further question rooted socio-political structures nevertheless remained present in his work. The compartment to which he has been confined, due to the thematic focus of his work by the markedly apolitical environment of the Czech fine arts of the time, in many respects reduced the understanding of his practice exclusively to issues with which the Czech environment had great difficulty identifying at the turn of the millennium. Themes, such as the structure of the globalised society, the functioning of the world of huge corporations and their effect on the private space of the individual, still seemed far remote from the local context, which was in the process of the continuing post-communist transformation. Kotík thus gained recognition primarily through his conceptual approach to the object, which even despite his conspicuous social-political overlap, was quite remote from the rather superficial nature of the so called “engaged art” of the 1990s.