Kryštof Netolický (born 1985 in Brno) represents Brno’s non-academic art scene – besides street art, he also makes music, does illustrations, publishes zines and has spent a long time working on a series of murals. In 1998, before turning his attention to painting, he began to work with graffiti, which he saw as a way of communicating with people in the city’s public space with the goal of pulling them out of their involuntarily established daily routines. He nevertheless left graffiti behind and refocused his interest on canvas painting, while still finding inspiration from graffiti and street art. For his paintings, he has drawn on pop culture and teenage aesthetics since 2012, when he and Marek Delong founded the Futurats90210 art group. His interest in this field increased around the year 2018, when he definitively moved away from classical graffiti and began to focus on murals. (His first murals were made in Brno in 2008.) In addition to painting large surfaces using façade paint and a roller on a telescoping stick, he also began to paint canvases without any tools, applying the acrylic paints with his fingers. He spent some time as a member of the Primitiv Group, which he founded along with Max Ticho and Kamil Rujbr, two friends who shared his graffiti past and were searching for ways of expressing themselves through naive painting. The group worked together in a studio at Káznice, a former prison near Brno’s Cejl Street.

In his paintings, Netolický explores personal experience, urban themes and street life, often finding ideas from his studio’s neighbourhood, known as the Brno Bronx. He has managed to incorporate his interest in public space and communication into his paintings, in which he uses the language of street art and graffiti. Working with reflective acrylic paints, Netolický creates art that straddles the line between the real and unreal while reflecting the unordinariness of the ordinary and the ordinariness of the unordinary. He tells stories that mix real life with grotesque and supernatural scenes, magical visions and fantastical beings; reality (often featuring Brno-specific elements) is interwoven with magical fiction and transformed into mystery. This exhibition of Netolický’s work from recent years takes its name from one of the exhibited paintings, in reference to what is basic, simple and essential. At the same time, it introduces – in its own peculiar way – a very secular theme into the former Jesuit College.