Born in former Czechoslovakia in 1952, Lumír Hladík lives and works in Toronto, Canada. He graduated from the Václav Hollar Art College in Prague, studying art and design, in 1976. Fascinated by the immediacy of the conceptual art movement in the 70’, he engaged in performance art, installations and intervention, along with similar-minded artists such as Karel Miler, Petr Štembera, Jan Mlčoch and Jiří Kovanda. He has adopted a very distinctive form of body art, described by the renowned art historian Pavlína Morganová as arranging “derailed situations”, documenting his art in photography and 8mm film. His early work explored the notions of alterity, mortality and determinism. After moving to Canada in 1982, Hladík connected vigorously with Canadian wilderness. He spent over three decades studying natural scenes of yet another aspect of mortality – entropy. His art mixes the solemnity of gothic and baroque exuberance with the essence of the ultimately disorderly, unruly, raging Canadian Primeval forest. Hladík’s work exploits and cross-pollinates wide spectrum of disciplines such as drawing, mixed media, vintage ready-mades, performance art, interventions and installations. His work is multilayered, riddled with ambiguity, double entendres and myriads of subtle references. Hladík claims that his art responds to today's society’s ubiquitously ridiculous "rational" defence of its own irrationality. His focus manifests itself through four streams of work.