Jan Pištěk
costume designer

The artist and film costume designer Jan Pištěk was born in Prague in 1961. He studied figurative painting and landscape painting at Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts (AVU), graduating in 1986. In 1990 he became a lecturer for a special painting studio at AVU, where he worked until 1995. In 1993 and 1994 he took up scholarship residencies in New York and Jackson Hole. His activities include painting, graphics, and film and theatre design. Noteworthy is his cooperation with his father Theodor Pištěk. Especially successful was his work on the hit musicals Rusalka and Monte Cristo, as well as on the film and television version of the cult sci-fi novels Dune and Children of Dune for Milk and Honey Pictures. In their scope and artistic workmanship, these joint projects are among the most demanding in Czech film and television history. As regards independent activities, highlights include Jan Pištěk’s artistic and costume-design work on the Forman Brothers Theatre’s performance Nachové plachty (Purple Sails) on a boat, the costume design for the production of Philip Glass’s minimalist opera La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast, at Prague’s National Theatre, and the creative costume show for the American cosmetics company Avon. The centre of gravity of his work remains, however, painting, to which he has devoted, with short breaks, since 1986. To date, he has held 22 independent exhibitions and participated in a host of prestigious collective exhibitions and representative displays of contemporary Czech art both at home and abroad. His works also form a part of the modern art collections of the National Gallery in Prague and other Prague and regional galleries, as well as private collections both in the Czech Republic and abroad.