Tomáš Kubík (painter)

Tomáš Kubík (born 15 October 1977) is a Czech painter. He is graduate of the Studio of Classical Painting Techniques of Prof. Zdeněk Beran at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Formerly, he was also active in dance and movement theatre, played the flute and worked as a teacher at a private painting school he co-founded.

Life
Tomáš Kubík comes from a family of an artist, advertising graphic designer and director of the local cultural centre in Pelhřimov, who led both his sons to visual arts and music. After finishing primary school he attended the Václav Hollar Art School in Prague in 1992–1996, where he mastered graphic techniques, modelling and photography in addition to drawing and painting. He went to copy masterpieces at the National Gallery and painted landscapes in the open air with his classmate Zdeněk Daňek. Since his youth he has played the flute.

After graduating from secondary art school he was admitted to the Studio of Classical Painting Techniques of Prof. Zdeněk Beran at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. His classmates at that time were Markéta Urbanová, Dagmar Hamsíková, Jan Mikulka, Marek Slavík and Daniel Pitín. During the six years that Kubík spent in Beran's studio (1996–2002), he was able to fully exercise his extraordinary technical skills and his natural inclination towards the work of the old masters. He devoted himself mainly to still life painting and live model drawing, and his works, including his earliest ones, were regularly exhibited at the Academy of Fine Arts for their extraordinary bravura of execution. The school offered opportunities for internships abroad, which he took full advantage of, visiting exhibitions of Rembrandt, Caravaggio and Michelangelo during his studies. He was also influenced by contemporary artists such as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, and therefore continued his studies at the Milan Knížák Studio of Intermedia in 2002–2004.

During his studies, Tomáš Kubík was already recognised as an exceptional talent when in his second year he received the Atelier Prize and the academyRector's Prize (1998) and in 2000 the Minister of Education's prize for exceptional achievements in painting. In the same year, he succeeded in the competition for a representative portrait of Karel Malý for the portrait gallery of the rectors of Charles University in Karolinum. His painting Scenes from Married Life was purchased by the National Gallery in Prague in 2004. Paintings from his first foreign exhibition in the USA (2002), which received excellent reviews in the local press, were sold off to private collections.

After graduating from the academy, he became active in Dance and movement theatre but never abandoned painting and painted smaller formats, portrait commissions, illustrations and storyboards/comics for advertising and film agencies. He later used his experience with digital painting and its combination with photomontage (matte painting) to prepare compositions in the Michelangelo project.

In 2017 he got married and in 2019 his son Nicholas was born. Tomáš Kubík also works as a teacher of painting. In 2010, he began taking students for individual painting lessons in his studio and in 2012 he co-founded an art school in Prague 1, which he ran until 2018. At that time, he left his shares to his partner so that he could devote himself entirely to painting.

Tomáš Kubík's first participation in a competition organised by the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in London brought him a special Award for Classically Inspired Portraiture (Highly Commended) from Burke's Peerage Foundation in 2021 for his portrait of David in the Renaissance style. The jury also selected another portrait by Kubík, Valeria, for the competition. In 2021, Kubík's painting Inner Rage was selected for the European Museum of Modern Art's (MEAM) annual show in Barcelona, Figurativas 2021.

Awards

 * 1998 Atelier Prize and the AVU Rector's Prize
 * 2000 Minister of Education's prize
 * 2021 Burke's Peerage Foundation Award for Classically Inspired Portraiture

Work
During his studies at secondary school, Tomáš Kubík painted en plein air and gravitated towards impressionist painting. In his first year at the academy, he devoted himself mostly to still life painting, and in his first series of paintings, which began originally in a post-impressionist style after Cézanne, he switched to realistic Trompe-l'œil painting as the arranged apples gradually deteriorated. Eventually, a series of five still lifes with apples and compotes on a checkered wool blanket, entitled "Study of Decomposition" (1997), was created on this theme. His veristic still lifes depict mostly quite ordinary objects, such as a dry aloe in a pot (Still Life with Cactus, 1997) or bunches of onions (Onions I and II, 1997, 1998), entirely in keeping with the aesthetic advocated by Prof. Beran.

Representation in collections

 * National Gallery in Prague
 * Private collections in the Czech Republic and United States

Author's

 * 2002 Tomáš Kubík: Selected paintings and drawings, Design Lab Gallery, Miami, USA
 * 2015 Tomáš Kubík: Drawings, Alina Gallery, Karlovy Vary, USA
 * 2019 Tomáš Kubík: Drawings, Thoughts, Records..., Winter Refectory of the Royal Canonry of Premonstratensians at Strahov
 * 2021 Tomáš Kubík: Michelangelo in Lockdown, Art Mosaic Gallery, Prague

Collective (selection)

 * 1997 Panorama of Mannerism, Galerie U prstenu, Prague
 * 1997/1998 The Last Picture, Rudolfinum Gallery, Prague
 * 2000/2001 Současná minulost. Czech Postmodern Modernism 1960-2000, Alšova jihočeská galerie v Hluboká nad Vltavou, Regional Gallery of Highlands, Jihlava
 * 2003 Academy of Fine Arts: Intermedia School of Professor Milan Knížák, Wortner House of the Alš South Bohemian Gallery, České Budějovice
 * 2003 Nejmladší / The youngest: Přehlídka výmladného umění nejmladší generace z let 1995 - 2003 (Exhibition of the youngest Generation Art from 1995 - 2003), Veletržní palác, Praha
 * 2004 Diplomanti AVU 2004, AVU Modern Gallery, Prague
 * 2005 Easter, U prstenu Gallery, Prague
 * 2005 Prague Studios, New Town Hall Gallery, Prague
 * 2006 IV. Zlín Salon of the Young
 * 2017 Fascinace skutečností: Hyperrealismus v české malbě / Fascination with Reality: Hyperrealism in Czech Painting, Museum of Art Olomouc - Museum of Modern Art, Olomouc
 * 2019 Artista Art Spoon, Villa Baruchello, Porto Sant'Elpidio, Italy
 * 2019-2020 Figurativas, MEAM Museum, Barcelona
 * 2019-2020 It's Already the Worst, Galerie 90°, Černošice
 * 2020 LA Art Show, Los Angeles, USA
 * 2021 Royal Society of Portrait Painters Annual Exhibition, London, UK
 * 2021 Figurativas 2021, MEAM Museum, Barcelona

Collective catalogues

 * Zdeněk Beran, Patrik Šimon, Liberating Certainty (The Phenomenon of Classical Painting 90 years), Eminent Prague 1997
 * Vlastimil Tetiva, Contemporary Past (Czech Postmodern Modernism 1960–2000), 176 p., Alšova jihočeská galerie v Hluboká nad Vltavou 2000, ISBN 80-85857-37-5
 * Petr Pastrňák a kol., Nejmladší / The youngest (Přehlídka výmladného umění nejmladší generace z let 1995-2003 / Exhibition of the youngest Generation Art from 1995 to 2003), 156 p., National Gallery in Prague 2003, ISBN 80-7035-199-3
 * Karolína Bayerová, Iva Nesvadbová, Lubomír Voleník, Art Prague (Veletrh současného umění / Contemporary Art Fair), 68 s., ART PRAGUE o.s. 2003
 * Milan Knížák, Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (Intermedia School of Professor Milan Knížák), 40 p., Alšova jihočeská galerie v Hluboká nad Vltavou 2003, ISBN 80-85857-65-0
 * Michael Rittstein, Graduates of AVU 2004, 60 p.
 * Jan Kříž, Nudes in Action (Exhibition of Graduates of Prof. Zdeněk Beran's Studio of Classical Painting), 20 p., ISBN 80-239-5736-8
 * Jan Kříž, Prague Studios, 84 p., Galerie U prstenu 2005
 * Ludvík Ladislav Ševeček, IV. Zlínský salon mladých / Zlín Youth Salon (První společná přehlídka českých a slovenských umělců do třiceti let / The first Joint Survey of Czech and Slovak Artists under the Age of Thirty), 144 p., Regional Gallery of Fine Arts in Zlín, p. o. 2006, ISBN 80-85052-63-6
 * Barbora Kundračíková (ed.), Fascinace skutečností / Fascination with Reality (Hyperrealismus v české malbě / Hyperrealism in Czech Painting), 282 p., Museum of Art Olomouc 2017, ISBN 978-80-88103-21-9