Jan Saudek’s photography is characterised by the duality of beauty and ugliness, grace and despondency, love and eroticism, brilliance and misery, hope and disappointment, joy and sadness. Her work explores the strength of women and the weakness of men, as well as the reverse, highlighting the eternal struggle between these polarities. Saudek, an adored and controversial man, reinvents his life through his photographs, creating a body of work of great emotional richness.

For Pavlina Hodkova, his current partner, with whom the exhibition was conceived, Saudek has methodically documented his life through his photographs. As he puts it bluntly, he has coveted and loved women all his life. His life has been filled with dreams, passion, desire, pleasure…

Creating freely in Prague in a difficult political context, Saudek at first celebrated the human family (fatherhood, motherhood, childhood and adolescence) up until the 1970s. Then, in the 1980s, treated the more provocative oppositions of love-hate, truth-lies, youth-old age and beauty-ugliness, not without irony and cynicism. Sweeping aside criticisms of perversity, he maintains his creative freedom with all the nuances of emotion, but with the vices, dark desires, obsessions and violence of the human soul.

Saudek is regarded as a provocative modern artist with a love of farce and American comics. He eschews conventional beauty and prefers to focus on the human body, celebrating its triviality, obscenity and reality. The exhibition at Galerie Orbis pictus features a large selection of artworks, mainly silver prints enhanced with unique colours, by the artist himself.