From the 2026/2027 academic year, the Painting Studio 1 has been led by artist Pádraig Timoney, with Tomáš Absolon as his assistant. The studio is now based in the Šaloun Studio in Vinohrady. The broad scope of the studio is an unending examination of the conditions for painting in whatever happens to be the current context.
Employees
Painting is language. How do we learn it? Like children learning to speak, by our own voluntary imitation. With will, and desire to contribute, to understand and communicate, and be included in the conversation. To decipher what other artists are saying. And we all learn to speak a language with our different local accents- while learning the pleasure of learning.
The broad scope of the studio is an unending examination of the conditions for painting in whatever happens to be the current context, and painting’s emergence somehow as a contemporarily differently-inflected historical branch of production, with a whole difficult ghost-mentality and persistence of address now, to a generalized area of human creative production, of which it used to be both epitome and spur. We question the permissibility of diversified behaviors within a specific discipline, about what is still acceptable within ‘painting’, not least within an art world context that grows ever more conservative while pretending to be daring, controversial, or expansive.
How would the results of material experiments affect our choice of application, how would it affect the intended result? If we found something strange happening with paint/photography/media as a result of our research, could we use that property to address a subject or intention or even a blank canvas that we had previously found unapproachable? We realize that we are in complicity with material and technique and determination. Can we begin to think of ourselves as being in control of what we are doing, and then also with that basis, forgetting, loosening, or realizing how control and intention are not always partners?
Where do our ideas of subject originate… how are the images we see everywhere in the world constructed to influence, attract or inform us.. can we deconstruct them in order to have a workshop of visual tools to reassemble our own, legible artworks? Can our contribution eventually become a critical liberation from those mediated images, where we argue that our work is much more than mere advertisements for our own being?
The class aims to help students negotiate the formation of their growing identities, both as creative practitioners and as persons, and to help them prepare for the vicissitudes and the disciplines needed to become practicing and, for themselves primarily, successful artists- with a comprehensive perspective on the current situation of art production, the dangers, the opportunities, and the determination needed to just co-exist in visibility.
The studio is taught in English. As well as continuing individual studio practice, we have regular rotating seminars in an accessible display space, where students select, install, and then discuss their work regularly with their peers and other professors. We have consultation between students as to how to progress, continue, bookmark areas and periods of study. We realize the possibility and limits of our agency- whether individual, group, class, and we work to understand and improve our capacities, both technically, intellectually, and with regard to the social, political and psychological factors influencing being and wellbeing.
We have regular, non-compulsory sessions where students volunteer to bring images, texts, moving images, sounds, of works by other artists and/or areas of culture they are particularly interested in. These artefacts will be presented to the group and discussed. This is useful for everyone- the selecting student bringing and presenting what they think is interesting, and their student group responding spontaneously to something perhaps unknown. The basis of discussion- what are we looking at here, live thought and response to it.
The class will invite a wide range of visitors to the studio and the school. Proposal for such invitations will also be sought from the students. Formally, our visitors will engage the class via dialogue- initiated workshops, seminars, critique sessions and individual tutorials. They will also be invited to make presentations open to the whole school- while some will be painters, others will be practitioners from a wide range of creative fields. They will be invited based on the relevance of their experience, activities in many different kinds of art-world and geographical locations. We envisage that these encounters will be invaluable and engaging opportunities for reciprocal exchange between visitors and students.
We welcome proposals for student applications to the class, exchanges to and from other studios, Erasmus program, and areas of research both general and particular to students’ requirements. We expand this to discussion of works and ideas found outside the Academy on student-researched, student-agreed and/or proposed work-trips, city, museum, gallery and studio visits, and research or familiarizing visits to Academies and Universities of other disciplines in the area, and local, well-known materials and production businesses.