Milan Houser: Great Outdoors

DANUBIANA – MILAN HOUSER

Exhibition Title: Great Outdoors

Curator: Vlado Beskid

For a long time now, Milan Houser (*1971, CZE) has worked with abstract painting overlapping with object creations. His approach is characterized by his examining all of the basic material components of a painting – the blind frame, canvas, and the paints. His relationship to painting is relatively “non-painting” or rather “non-auretic” as he mostly uses industrial materials and technology, and creates extensive untitled series of paintings operating with firmly established formal rules. He has spent a great deal of time studying and verifying the possibilities of the use of a specially made varnish which is nowadays his dominating technological preference. He repeatedly pours varnish on his paintings and lets them dry in order to achieve massive depth and complicated color fusions from shallow edges with a definite and even radically direct visual result. The fact that he creates his paintings exclusively “by his own hand” without any the help of machines is an important feature; however it disturbs the aesthetic depersonalization of his work. Houser’s work is characterized by its formal compendiousness and consistency. He “logically” inclines toward extensive and never completed series of paintings in which he strives to embrace all of the nuances of methods and possibilities to handle his technology.

Milan Houser has been teaching at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno since 2008 and in 2011 he was appointed dean. His works are represented in state and private collections in Slovakia and abroad.