He came from an artistically oriented family. His father, General Rudolf Medek, was a writer, his mother, Eva, was the daughter of the painter Antonín Slavíček, and his brother, Ivan, was a journalist, music columnist, and later also chancellor of President Václav Havel. Medek graduated from the State School of Graphics in Prague in 1942–1944 and then briefly studied at the Academy of Fine Arts (1945–1946). Studies here and at the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design in Prague (1946–1949), where he was a student of Fr. Muzika and Fr. Tichý, he did not finish when he was expelled after the communist coup as part of the purges as the son of a legionnaire and a general of the First Republic army. After that, he briefly worked as an auxiliary worker in Škodovka in Smíchov, but he did not stop painting and supported himself with occasional orders. In 1951, he married Emila Tláskalová, an artistic photographer, who later became a great support for him throughout his life. He died after a long and serious illness on August 23, 1974 at the age of only forty-seven.

Mikuláš Medek was one of the most important representatives of modern Czech painting of the 20th century, who stood up even in international comparisons and who influenced many artists of his generation with his life attitudes. During his short life, he created an extensive work of painting influenced first by expressionism and cubism, but surrealism and existentialism had a major influence on his work. Later, he began to move from figuration to abstraction and became a key figure in the painterly expression known as informel. At the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, Medek began working with synthetic enamels in combination with oil, which helped him create a distinctive painting technique of layering paint on top of each other. In this way, specific multi-layered color structures are created, which are then disturbed and scratched with a spatula, knife or fingers. Around 1965, under the influence of the new figuration, the "figure" began to return to Medek's work, albeit in an abstracted form, as various revived mechanisms or updated forms of the animal world.

During this period, a painting from the gallery‘s collections "Reconstruction of a vegetarian" was also created. It is a monumental canvas, painted in cool blue and warm red with cartoonish black accents, standing on the border of two periods when the "event" captured by the dematerialized mass of paint is again organized into a refined construction of figures. A monstrous red head with linear signs of eyes, nose and mouth, which emerge from the structure of the colored matter as a wound, sits on the black cross of the tiny torso in an unclear connection. Also in the blue area are small linear micro-images of geometrized shapes.

Jana Bojanovská, August 2024