“As time went by, I developed my visual language step by step, and new genres popped up along the way like street art and later, Urban Art. So, I only recently fitted into the street art ‘box’; to many I am just considered a contemporary artist.”
Jan Kaláb is one of those artists who cannot be reduced to a single medium: he creates paintings and sculptures as well as NFTs, installations, and murals … and often, his works are precisely at the frontier between different media, namely painting and sculpture.
Kaláb quickly became a pioneer of graffiti in the Czech Republic in the 1990s. After years of graffiti writing, a trip to New York enabled him to discover the American stage that embodies the birth of the movement and to paint over two hundred whole cars. His work is constantly evolving, from lettering to 3D graffiti by way of gigantic murals in many countries.
As he graduated from the Prague Institute of Fine Arts in 2008, his practice progressively moved from the street into his workshop, but without cutting ties with urban art. Testimony to this are his many sculptures installed in public spaces and his Art in Public series, started in 2014, which consists of photographs of his canvases held by strangers met in the streets of various world capitals.
Today, Kaláb is continuing his exploration of the forms, abstraction and colours that formed the basis of his graffiti work as a teenager, except that the emancipation of lettering has given him access to a richer, less restricted vocabulary that is also more universal because it is more abstract.
While he has long been interested in a variety of geometric shapes, his experimentation has gradually focused on circular forms: the circle, as deformed as possible, flat, in volume, sometimes full, sometimes empty. His last works are both paintings and sculptures: they are voluminous canvases, which frames he builds himself, and on which he paints subtle colour gradations, playing with light variations and volume effects to blur the line between full and hollow.
Born in 1978 in Tchecoslovaquia, Jan Kaláb is a graduate of the Prague Academy of Fine Arts where he had his first solo show in 2008. Other solo and group shows have since followed in many countries, accompanying the artist’s international recognition. His work has been exhibited in museums such as the Albin Polasek Museum (Florida, US), the National Czech & Slovaque Museum (West Cedars, US), the MAXXI Museum (Rome, Italy) and the Museu de Arte Moderna (São Paulo, Brasil). He lives and works in Prague.