David Černý

Biography

The IS-2 tank stood on Kinských Square in Smíchov as a memorial to the liberation of Prague in 1945. On the night of 27–28 April 1991 Černý and an acquaintance painted it pink, and fixed a raised finger, an obscene gesture, to the turret. The artist was arrested for hooliganism. After a protest from the Russian government the tank was restored to its former colour, whereupon fifteen members of parliament painted it pink again, in protest at the arrest. Černý was released, and the tank was taken away to a military history museum in Lešany. Later he proposed putting a pink tank permanently in Prague, but the city hall refused. For a time the tank was shown in Lázně Bohdaneč.

He was born on 15 December 1967 in Prague, into a Jewish family. He studied at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, in the studio of Kurt Gebauer, from 1988; the year he finished is given differently, 1994 or 1996. There were also periods in the United States: the P.S.I. artists’ residency in New York in 1994–1995, the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1995–1996, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 1996. In 1991 he had also spent some time at a Swiss government residency in Boswil.

Before the tank came “Bones” (1990), beneath the monument to Stalin, and “Quo vadis” (1990): a Trabant on human legs, recalling the East Germans who left through the West German embassy in Prague in the summer and autumn of 1989. It was placed on Old Town Square, and a bronze cast has stood in the garden of the German embassy since 2001.

In 1999 came “Horse”: Saint Wenceslas sits on the belly of a dead horse hung by its legs. It mocks the reverence for Josef Myslbek’s monument on Wenceslas Square. At first the sculpture stood at the bottom of the square, directly facing the original; now it hangs in the Lucerna Passage. Lucerna’s owner, Dagmar Havlová, agreed with the artist that the work would stay there until a constitutional monarchy is restored in the Czech lands.

The babies on the Žižkov Television Tower went up in 2000 as a temporary installation, part of the programme Prague European City of Culture. By the end of the year they were taken down, but in 2001 they were fixed there for good: ten black figures made of laminate. In 2000 Černý received the Jindřich Chalupecký Award.

“Shark” (2005) shows a bound Saddam Hussein in a tank of formaldehyde. It is a parody of a work by Damien Hirst, and at the 2005 Prague Biennale it won a special prize. Showings were banned in Middelkerke in Belgium and in Bielsko-Biała in Poland. Among his other works are “Hanging Man” (1997), a sculpture of Sigmund Freud hanging by one hand, mistaken for a suicide when shown in Grand Rapids and Seoul; the fountain “Piss” in the courtyard of the Hergetova Cihelna brickworks (2004), whose streams write words, including ones sent by SMS; “Feast of Giants” (2005), a bus stop in Liberec in the form of a laid table; and “METALmorphosis” (2007), a seven-metre stainless steel head in Charlotte.

In 2007 Černý, together with the musician David Koller and the filmmaker Alice Nellis, founded the cultural centre MeetFactory in a former railway depot in Smíchov. His “Red Cars” hang above the entrance.

“Entropa” was commissioned for the Czech presidency of the Council of the EU in the first half of 2009. On the sixteen-metre construction each country was represented by a stereotype: Bulgaria as a row of squat toilets, the Czech Republic as a screen with quotations from Václav Klaus. The twenty-seven artists from different countries who had been announced turned out to be fiction: the work was done by Černý himself and assistants, among them Tomáš Pospiszyl and Kristof Kintera. The Bulgarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs protested.

Later came “London Booster” for the 2012 Olympics, a double-decker bus with mechanical arms doing push-ups; “Head of Franz Kafka” (2014) outside the Quadrio shopping centre, eleven metres high with 42 rotating layers; “Trifot” (2016) by the Nové Butovice metro station; and “Pegasuses” (2017) in Waltrovka. On 21 August 2018, the fiftieth anniversary of the 1968 invasion, he placed on Kinských Square the torso of a tank with a white invasion stripe, as a temporary piece, and then the permission was extended. In April 2023 he opened the museum and gallery Musoleum in Smíchov, and in 2024 he hung on the facade of the Máj building two twenty-metre butterflies with Spitfire bodies, in memory of the Czechoslovak pilots of the Royal Air Force.