Vladimír Houdek studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague at the studio from Vladimír Skrepl. In 2012 he reveived the Jindřich Chalupecký Award for young artists. With his painterly work, where collage and materiality of paint are combined and formal abstraction is tied with representational narration, he is part of a generation of painters, who define the space and impact for a painting in a new way – especially at a moment in time, when painting seems to have painted almost everything. Since Gerhard Richter, who has suspended with his work the pretended antagonism between abstraction and representation, in favour of a self-sustaining cosmos of painting, and since the insight, that every image, what we might create for the visual reality, is not a representation of the visual reality but instead always a reality in itself, painting has won a new freedom.