Personality

When Miloslav Pluháček entered the world of art after the study of figurative painting and sculpture, he chose a career of a solitaire and lone. He never joined a period stream, he never became a member of an artistic group. He is a man whose artistic way led to a place different from that of the others.

In the beginning of his work he used the expressive style to depict figures from the periphery of towns and the fridge of life. At the turn of the years 1980/1981 he destroyed his artistic works, and six years later, during another auto-da-fé, he burnt his correspondence, diaries and photographs. At the turn of the 1980s Miloslav Pluháček relinquished the figurative painting, and in his pictures he used a minimalistic concept to analyse natural phenomena (rain, wind, shadows etc.).
His artistic work turned again in the first half of the 1990s. After nearly twenty years, he returned to his beginnings, figurative paintings and stories which he had strictly rejected thoroughly until that time. He chose a seemingly anachronistic technique of painting, which reminded of chiaroscuro, and entered a treacherous field of biblical themes. He injected modern times into the traditionalistic religiosity and changed the medieval art of praying into the twenty-first century. He transformed medieval female saints into modern women, he placed modern fragments in reliquaries, and he proved that the Cross is not a symbol of the past and even the monstrance can have an unexpected form. Many pictures, sculptures and spatial artefacts include humour – a subject-matter that nobody dared to apply in the sacral art before him. It is possible to spot a smile, a compassionate faint smile, a laugher, as well as a sarcastic sneer of king´s fool. The unique set of twenty-two nude portraits of European aristocracy can seem to be a certain deviation. The large canvases are an example of Manet´s irony, but the pictures click into the context and line of Pluháček´s works.
Similar to painting, even Miloslav Pluháček´s sculptural work underwent a stage of the initial expressive figurative motifs. Over the time, through works made from natural elements with passing lifetime and in minimalistic expression, the artist arrived at full freedom in his sculptures. His artistic vocabulary is simple and containing selected elementary forms on the one side; on the other one, it is as sweeping as the Baroque style, and balanced to the Rococo ornamentality.
Unique is the project, in which Miloslav Pluháček did not comprehend the Cross as a symbol of Christianity but as an expression for sorrows as such. His cross artefacts can be seen in a Catholic church, in a concentration camp, on a papal insignia, or in a leprosarium.
He wipes differences between a plane and a space in his canvases and sculptures. He is concentrated on the essence, therefore he mostly negates the background setting and hides it in darkness. All the artist´s works feature sophistry, invention, irony, and mockery of stupidity and provincialism as well as of intellectual narcissism. He is a catty glossator with the Fellini-style detached view and he refers to history and literature, whereby he finds his inspiration mainly in the Bible. Despite all the included elements of humour and a certain playfulness, Miloslav Pluháček´s works are critical and on a high-wire, and they are mostly understood as scandalous.
For the whole of his hitherto life, Miloslav Pluháček has been concerned with himself and he is almost pathologically indifferent to the presentation of his works. In spite of the controversy in his artistic creation, his works can be found in important private collections and galleries.