Born in Prostějov, David Bartoš (*1993) and frontman of the band Chilly Weather entered the art scene several years ago as an art student at the Faculty of Education at Palacký University in Olomouc, where his artistic expression towards intermediality and conceptual approaches took shape. He later enriched his Olomouc experience and the influence of the teacher and artist Vladimír Havlík with the simultaneous perspective of the environmental studio of Barbara Klímová and Matěj Smetana at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno. His positive relationship to nature, connected among others with active mountaineering, was reflected in a number of environmental events and happenings (e.g. carrying of stones up Kosíř hill in Štemberov) or land art interventions in the landscape.
His work has a rocky conceptual background (many of his works hark back in mood to the golden era of Czech action art of the 1970s), undeniable traces of playfulness and a sense of humor, and the ability to express himself with ease on pressing political and social issues. Other constant denominators are his work with text (whether written or read) and his masterful approach to video. From the beginning, Bartoš has been characterized by his natural energy and interest in becoming an active agent of the cultural scene, whether as an initiator of happenings, curator and gallerist of the independent Gallery Cyril in Prostějov in the tower of the local church, or as an instigator of discussions around social issues that are important to him, which turn into his own artistic expressions.
Similarly, he conceived his graduation thesis Integral Humanism (2017) at the Department of Art Education at UP, for which he created a social doctrine of integral humanism, promoting contemporary humanist issues and world peace through the professional rhetoric of political campaigns.
He thinks similarly in his concept for the exhibition Enviromem, in which he gradually fills the niches of KontText with a simulated alternative reality subject to authorial manipulations. Here, he confronts the practices of sociological research with the actual mechanisms of the dissemination of memes, hoaxes and conspiracy theories, illustrating not only the circulation of information in mass media and social networks, but above all the transformation of a person untainted by anything, and thus fully free, into an object that acts, thinks, learns, studies, lives within ideologies, whether social, cultural, political or religious.
