Jan Merta was born in the year 1952 in Šumperk. He graduated from the Secondary Vocational School of Art in Prague, also known as “Hollarka”. He did not continue his studies at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts until nearly ten years later, between 1981 and 1987. In the meantime, he tried a range of civil professions. In the nineteen eighties, he took part in Confrontations and fundamental performances by the post-modern generation and since then he has exhibited in this country and abroad. In the nineteen nineties his work was placed in the context of exhibitions titled Trial Operation and Reduced Budget. He is considered a painter who has surpassed the limits of his time, his paintings are membranes between the volatility, flow, and fleetingness of time and the permanence of items and phenomena. Merta uses the names of some of his exhibitions as sophisticated provocation (Art Lovers, Exhibition, Gallery, Muzeum, To My South Moravians and To My Prague Residents). He is interested in the relationship between the world of art and the outside world (70% artist, 30% tram driver), he considers the boundaries of art and the possibilities of its perception. He is critical of the state of society (Morality, Stockhausen’s Symphony), but simultaneously uses it for pleasure, deliberation and seizure of the hedonistic quality of painting (Morsels, Starter and Dessert). The current exhibition at Museum Kampa presents a collection of paintings from a series of portraits, landscapes, and events, which have not been previously exhibited in Prague.

Museum Kampa — Jan and Meda Mládek Foundation