The Great Meal

Medek began to work on the painting when he joined the Czech Surrealist Group. It is the key work of his ‘red figuration’ period by which the artist separated from his original inspiration by the works of Toyen and Joan Miró. At the beginning of the 1950s, ‘aggression’ was Medek’s main topic in response to the escalated political situation. In his painting Grand Meal, which ranges to the series of the artist’s paintings with the common ‘action’ topic, the everyday motif changes with the use of the red colour, sharp points, and transformation of human beings into a drastic self-destruction feast. The tension is achieved through focusing on details and halted action, whose continuation would result in the release of destruction. In the Czech milieu of the first half of the 1950s, Medek’s singular art production shows remarkable association with the production of the Romanian–French surrealist Victor Brauner and the fashionable mannerist existentialism of the French painter Bernard Buffet.