Jan Mikulka

Jan Mikulka (born 4 April 1980) is a Czech painter.

He is known for his still-life painting and figurative and portrait work.

He was awarded three times at the international competition held by The Royal Society of Portrait Painters in London, a showcase of contemporary portraiture.

Mikulka was born on 4 April 1980 in Prague.

During his second year of high school, he took up ceramics and attended afternoon figure drawing classes at the School of Arts and Crafts, taught by sculptor Vojtěch Adamec.

He decided not to continue his studies at the high school and passed the entrance examination for the subject of woodcarving and wood shaping at the Higher Vocational School of Arts and Crafts in Prague (1996-2000).

From there, he was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 2000, to the Studio of Classical Painting Techniques of Prof. Zdeněk Beran at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, from which he graduated in 2006.

As a student at the Academy, he presented his works at the Portrait 2000 exhibition in Klatovy and at the International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Prague (2004, 2005).

Jan Mikulka has been working in portraiture since his high school studies and first exhibited before his admission to the Academy in 2000.

Prof. Zdeněk Beran's studio was characterized by a perfect mastery of the technique of oil glaze painting and, simultaneously, by competitiveness.

In his post-graduation years, Mikulka experimented with painting on the edge of abstraction, attempting to capture the movement and swirling of water and the optical distortion of the reflection of the surroundings on the restless surface (Water, 2008-2011).

His work, which can be classified in the broader category of genre scenes, is characterized by a variety of subject matter and art.

In 2011 he won the BP Portrait Award, two years later the first prize for self-portraiture (SELF Portrait Prize, 2013), and in 2016 The Changing Faces Prize, also awarded by The Royal Society of Portrait Painters.

In 2011, he was selected from 2,500 entries for an international competition in London and won the BP Portrait Award, and in 2013 he was the first recipient of the newly announced SELF Prize for Self-Portraiture, awarded by The Royal Society of Portrait Painters in London and associated with a £20,000 reward.

He won in a competition of 946 works by 635 painters from many countries.

Mikulka intended to paint a large realistic portrait, but he could not find a suitable model, so he decided to paint himself.

"Mikulka's Self Portrait amazes with its technical perfection and power of expression. "You feel that you are standing in front of the artist, watching him concentrate on his likeness – his eyes hooded yet determined, his lips pressed together through concentration. (Charlotte Mullins, editor of Art Quarterly)

Since 2012 he has been exhibiting independently.

After graduation, he devoted himself to portraiture and computer graphics.

This is to a large extent also true for one's own reflection in the mirror when painting a self-portrait (Self-Portrait, 2013).

If the photographic portrait is a capture of an immediate moment, the painterly portrait offers a unique continuity of perceptual self-absorption during the creative process.

Mark Gisbourne appreciates, that "unlike most contemporary self-portraiture, Mikulka's work does not seek to stylize or evoke symbolic associations, idealization, or psychological probing, but rather evokes a sense of distant and impenetrable introspection that provokes uncertainty in the viewer".

Mikulka's commissioned portraits usually depict people from a frontal perspective.

If a natural setting is used in the background, it is stripped of unnecessary descriptiveness and serves only to emphasize the subject's presence.

In 2015, he received an award at the Figurativas exhibition at the Museo Europeo de Arte Moderno in Barcelona.

The muted penumbra effect of the background also works to model the skin complexion (Sebastian, 2015, In the Park, 2015).

In the more formal official portraits, his painting is to some extent more akin to a photographic quality, although even here presented as a subjective interpretation of reality.

In 2016 he received The Changing Faces Foundation award at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters annual exhibition in London for his painting In the Park.

In 2019, he was again among the five prize-winning painters in the Figurativas competition (10th International Painting and Sculpture Competition of the Arts and Artists Foundation) in Barcelona for his portrait Sebastian.

His paintings are represented in the collection of the National Gallery in Prague, The Changing Faces Foundation, Museo Europeo de Arte Moderno and in private collections.

He is represented by the Cermak Eisenkraft Gallery in Prague.

Mikulka has achieved acclaim in international competitions and is one of the few Czech painters to receive commissions from high-ranking customers from Great Britain to the Gulf.

His paintings are laborious and take several months to complete, which is why they rarely appear on the open market..

Mikulka consciously follows the heritage of classical painting from the Renaissance to 19th century academic painting, but his realistic portraits are very contemporary.

In doing so, he distances himself from photorealistic paintings with a smooth finish and from static and nondescript contentless images.

He does not use the high resolution typical of magazine photography and does not put emphasis on illusionistic painting.

The mimesis of his painting does not mean a copy or exact imitation of an existing subject, but an attempt to approach the hidden essence of the subject, which includes the factor of time.

According to the gallerist Pavel Feigl - "Mikulka can express the psychology of man, he can capture man in his complexity, as a human being charged with feelings and spiritual vibration".

Portrait painting also carries the inevitable presence of the artist as a "mirror of reality."

This sense of self-reflexive gaze deepens the painter's intuitive sense of self and of the perception of the model, creating their interdependence.