Disappointment Photograph

Magister of Art Martin Kámen (*1982) graduated The Academy of Fine Art, Prague (New Media Art) 2008. His work was presented at nearly fifty exhibitions internationally - Amsterdam, Barcelona, Los Angeles, London, Prague, Warsaw. He became the curator of twenty exhibitions of contemporary acclaimed artists. Art works of Martin Kámen are represented in the collections of the National Gallery in Prague, the Goethe-Institut of Los Angeles, the Jan and Meda Mládek Foundation, the Skalička Chateau and other private collections. He´s started with photography in 1999. His first solo exhibition was in 2003 in No D Gallery - Roxy, Prague. 2007- 2011 he was a director and script writer of QUEER Programme Show for Czech Television. In 2008, he co-established The Chemistry Gallery in Prague. 2008 - 2012 as an art director in The ICON Gallery, Prague. He was one of the founders and president of HIV/AIDS charity project Art for Life in Czech Republic (2007 - 2015). Between 2011-2015 he was a photographer of National Theatre in Prague. In 2015 he moved to Barcelona and started to teaching at Estudio Nómada - Art School a field of photography and video art. Since 2019 he lives and works in Madrid. -- My intention is to reflect distinctive artistic life attitude and aesthetic form, through which I also express criticism of today's society. I draw from the visual bank of artistic expressions of the past and present, use existing dictionaries, but newly program, construct and fill them with current meanings. In the postmodern spirit I work with quotations from Baroque masters of painting, such as Frans Snyders, J.D. Heem, P. Claesz, or with mythological themes elaborated by neoclassical authors led by French academics Jean Broc, Jean Delville or W. A. Bouger. Tension, death, conflict, all this emanates from photographs that do not allow the audience to leave them without being disturbed. I do not let the viewer enjoy the empty beauty, but urge with the given themes and with a formally mastered work. In it, I use my knowledge of art history, photographic craft and also artistic imagination and creativity. Works selected from my portfolio demonstrate that Baroque feelings and Baroque aesthetics have not disappeared, even more than five centuries after.