Chaba Karel

* 3.8.1925 Sedlec near Prague - + August 25, 2009. Czech painter, self-taught. He painted Prague most often. Represented in countless collections, including the National Gallery in Prague.

The painter of Prague nooks and crannies was educated privately. For a twenty-year-old boy and a beginning painter, Prague meant everything he was looking for: crooked romantic nooks and crannies, the atmosphere of secluded streets, patties and everyday poetry with pairs of lovers and lonely pedestrians. Writer Bohumil Hrabal said of him that he saw Prague for the first time through the eyes of a country boy - and that view remained. His work was influenced by Marc Chagall and Jan Zrzavý. He never subscribed to any collective movement of visual artists, his unprofessional training was the cause of the enhanced originality of his paintings. "He entered the history of our painting by other methods than usual. He had no schools, but his first exhibition was held in 1960 in the famous D 34 theater of Emil František Burian, where he became an intellectual at the time," said František Dvořák, an art historian and connoisseur of his work. years ago at the opening of an exhibition dedicated to his eighties in the Prague Municipal House. "However, he has always wanted to express his relationship with Prague, rather than the image of Prague," he added Chaba created his paintings of Prague not as copies of reality, but as his dreams of Prague. He painted the vast majority of his paintings in the silence of his studio. From 1962 he worked as a freelance artist. His work has been exhibited in countless solo and group exhibitions at home and abroad, his works are, among others, represented in the collection of modern art of the National Gallery in Prague.