Ales Ogoun - NFT Exhibition of the Czech painter | SOPRG

We are very proud to present our next exhibition. The collaborating painter is the renowned artist Mr. Ales Ogoun, who decided to boldly enter the metaverse with his art in the form of NFT. The opening will take place on 26.5.2022 at 21:00 CET in our SOPRG gallery in Somnium Space.

Let’s start with a few of his words about the exhibition.

I conceived the exhibition as a new way of presenting an older series of paintings in confrontation with later colourist paintings.

The virtual form awakened my Lightpainting paintings, which I painted in the 1980s, breathing new life into them. Thanks to contemporary technical possibilities, the constant movement of the light creba in their plated surface is thus fully expressed, working with the movement of light as part of the painting. Thanks to technology, something is possible that was undreamed of 35 years ago, and even the technical difficulty of gallery presentations did not guarantee the full expression of the paintings.
I have expanded the exhibition with paintings from the following years. Their basis is an emotional work with colour and fragments of reality and abstraction, whose larger formats have plenty of space in the virtual gallery.

Curriculum vitae – Doc.akad.mal.Aleš Ogoun, lives and works in Prague

Brief professional CV
1982 graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague under Prof. Jan Smetana. In 1981 he completed an internship at the Royal Academy of Arts Antwerp Since then he has been consistently working as a freelance painter. So far, he has organized 60 solo exhibitions, several happenings , realizations in architecture and benefit auctions, and participated in more than 100 joint exhibitions. He is represented in the collections of the National Gallery Prague, the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, GASK Kutná Hora and other important state and private collections.
In 2001-2013 he was a member of the Association of Visual Artists Mánes, now in a splinter faction of the Free Association M.

In 2004 he was appointed Associate Professor of Free Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava.

He applied his graphic skills in 1988 and 1989 as a graphic designer for the samizdat Lidové Noviny.
During these years he was also co-director of the Gallery of the Young, the first uncensored gallery since 1968.
Since 1993, he has also been a teacher, leading painting and drawing studios at the University of Pardubice, Hradec Králové and ARCHIP Prague. Until now, he has been the head of the painting studio at the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Art at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, where he has educated dozens of future painters over the past 8 years.

Technical innovation
In the 1980s he applied the technique of hot-dip coating to the surfaces of his paintings. He called the technique LIGHTPAINTING and we will talk about it later.
In 2016, he began applying NFC chips to paintings in connection with digitization and sound transmission,
which became an equal part of the painting.

Music
In his youth, classical violin and piano studies. Since the 1980s he has worked as a violinist, keyboard player and as a composer in alternative music formations : Almamoderator(+Fr.Skála), Hogo Fogo,Výrobní krása, Krásné nové stroje and Hugo fogo colour orchestra)

Sport
Rowing 1969 – 1980 and made it to Olympic selection

Lectures
many, including Rotary Club Prague 2000, contemporary Czech art scene and practice

bibliography – selection
“Repayment on Debt”, Luhan- Pouba, Torst 2000
“Who is Who in the Czech Republic” 1991/2; 1994/5; 2001/2; 2005
Dictionary of visual artists ” Chagall”
Dictionary of Visual Artists of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences

Illustrations :
Newspapers and magazines 1985 – 89, including Playboy magazine in 1993
Book by Petr Chudožilov ” Carp in the Thorns after 30 years” 1994

Children:
Lukáš(1979), Štěpánka(1983), Linda(1985), Bára(2009), Žofie(2012)

Exhibitions

Ales has been exhibiting since 1981. Until now he has had about 60 solo and over 100 group exhibitions, the most interesting of which are:

A selection of solo exhibitions-

1988, 1989 Young Gallery, Prague and Brno 1.exhibitions of Ligtpainting technique
1990 Galerie L´espace, Paris .
1992 Forum Exhibition Hall, Prague, Czechia Ligtpainting exhibition
2007 Galerie Magna; Ostrava, Czechia
2013 Galerie L.Sutnar, Pilsen, Czechia
2019 Galerie U Prstenu,Studio A.Ogoun and his students, Prag, Czechia

Selection of joint exhibitions

1987 Salon de Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
1995 Bridges, Mánes Gallery, Prague, Berlin, Czechia, Germany
Festival international de la peinture, Cagnes-sur-mer, France
2008 Art Prag , Czechia
2009 S.V.U.Mánes,association exhibition , Berlin, Bratislava, Germany, Slowakia
2016 Memento Tiziani ; Kroměříž, Czechia

Creating
I have always drawn and painted, also played violin and piano, and in my life I have practiced both muses. I just started doing the painting professionally and the music as a supplementary thing. I had my first unofficial exhibition in the corridor of the Jan Neruda Gymnasium in Prague in 1970.
After I graduated from the Academy in Prague, I supported myself with part-time jobs and illustrations for newspapers, because exhibitions and sales were almost impossible in Bolshevik times.

Lightpainting
In the mid-1980s I was fascinated by the phenomenon of light, which I discovered on a trip to Baghdad, and then by light in glass, which visually appealed to me in the glassworks in Nový Bor. In the dark studio where I was working, I accidentally experimentally combined metal with the image, illuminated it, and the theme was born: bringing light into the image, symbolically as optimism into the then political dark age, figuratively into the gloomy symbolism of my paintings.

Fragmental colour painting

My work was greatly influenced when I started teaching in Litomyšl in 1993. The idyllic environment started a turning point in my work, bringing colour and joy into it. The way of working was shaped by the realization that according to artistic psychology, the aesthetic pleasure is primarily received by the viewer and only secondarily is the work deciphered according to the viewer’s maturity.
It is precisely because of this emotional level of perception of the painting that I began to work with repetitive fragments of reality in my work in the late 1990s and used them as a carrier of the subject of the painting. Thus I came to combine both emotional and rational forms of creation. .

During my time at the University of Pilsen I tried to work with the synthesis of image and music in one work, using NFC chips. After a lacklustre audience response, I have once again embraced the painterly side of my work and now, after the end of my hectic years in academia , I am able to devote myself fully to my art.