(1977) Painter, poet and educator. He studied at Palacký University in Olomouc, and later at Humboldt University and the Universität der Künste in Berlin. He taught painting at art schools in both the Czech Republic and the United States. He has been exhibiting solo since 2001. A large part of Forman's work deals with the conceptualisation of the human face. The artist intervenes in the original physiognomy, which transforms more or less into animal forms. In these hybrid constructions, the human becomes an animal—most often an ape, but also an owl or a cat. These fantastic heads, often bordering on the monstrous, are typically set in dark surroundings. This combination of anthropo-animal form and darkness offers several interpretive layers. One of them concerns the unconscious, where signal points related to our origins in the animal kingdom are present. The closely interwoven human and animal face symbolises permeability and tight interconnectedness. Another recognisable feature is the collage-like composition of various facial fragments into one, disturbing the scale of individual parts and the usual expressions of cognitive processes—such as eyes moving in different directions or unrelated facial grimaces. The result is a multi-collage caricature of a face, blending different emotional effects and disrupting the familiar scheme of reading the face as a predictable psychological construct whose communicative field we know how to decipher (eye movement, facial expression, etc.). The third distinct aspect of Forman’s painting is his portrayal of children and their world. Here, he departs from deformities or animal body hybridisation and captures child figures in direct transcription. Yet, even here we find subtle disruptions of physiognomy, such as the shadow of a houseplant leaf falling across the face. Translation created with the assistance of AI (ChatGPT).