11.9. – 11.10. 2014

Parafin, London

Parafin is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition at its gallery at 18 Woodstock Street, Mayfair, showing new paintings by the young Czech artist Hynek Martinec (b. 1980). Martinec’s works are ambitious statements about time, spirituality and the nature of reality. Martinec’s extraordinary hyperrealist paintings combine a deep commitment to art history with contemporary subject matter.

Known primarily for an ongoing series of photorealist portraits depicting his partner Zuzana, which have been exhibited

internationally, Martinec’s new project is a series of large-scale monochrome paintings, collectively entitled ‘Every Minute You Are Closer to Death’. These technically astonishing works depict carefully contrived compositions that play with the archetypes of the devotional picture and the vanitas. Traditional signifiers of mortality such as dead animals, skulls, candles and empty bottles are mixed with contemporary references such as Damien Hirst’s notorious diamond skull displayed on a tablet computer, a digital radio, party balloons and cotton buds. In many of the paintings the subjects are distorted by shaving foam, a contemporary substance which appears solid but which is actually fluid and mutable, and which evokes both vanity and impermanence.