He united the artistic tradition of over three generations[1] and thanks to the originality of his expression, depth and spirituality of his extraordinary work, he occupies one of the most prominent places in the Czech art history of the post-war period.

Emila Medková was employed as a photographer at the Institute of Human Work, and her daughter was looked after by Mikuláš on weekdays or stayed with her grandmother Emilie Tláskalová and her parents commuted to see her.

A difficult period followed, when he worked for several months at a revolver lathe in the Škoda engineering plant in Smíchov (1950) and finally had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized at Bulovka.

The artists were commissioned and supplied with painting materials by Jaroslav Puchmertl, a sculptor and former member of the Ra group who was employed by the Central Committee of the National Front.

In 1951, Emila and Mikuláš Medek joined the group of surrealists around Karel Teige and participated in the samizdat editions Znamení zvěrokruhu (Signs of the Zodiac) and Object and in the questionnaires on surrealism organized by Vratislav Effenberger.

The whole group of surrealists was monitored and eavesdropped on by the secret police (Action: Mazalové), and several StB collaborators were in the vicinity of Mikuláš Medek and reported on him (Egon Bondy, Jaroslav Puchmertl, Josef Vyleťal, Stanislav Drvota).

[9] In 1960 Ludmila Vachtová submitted an article about five Czech painters (Medek, Istler, Koblasa, Kotík, Sklenář) to the review La Biennale di Venezia.

The exhibition Imaginative Painting 1930-1950, prepared in 1964 at the Aleš South Bohemian Gallery in Hluboká nad Vltavou by Věra Linhartová and František Šmejkal, was banned by the regional committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and was not open to the public.

In the last years of normalization, Mikuláš Medek returned to the public consciousness thanks to an exhibition organised by Antonín Hartmann in 1988 in the Gallery of Modern Art in Roudnice nad Labem.

In 1990, after the fall of communist regime, monographic exhibitions of Mikuláš Medek were held in regional galleries in Prague, Brno, Hluboká, Jihlava, Olomouc and Ostrava.

He was deeply influenced by the literary works of Ladislav Klíma, Franz Kafka and Richard Weiner,[19] his relationship with Emila and his friendships with Zbyněk Sekal, Libor Fára and Jan Koblasa.

The paintings from the surrealist period include quotations from the works of Paul Klee, Miró, Yves Tanguy and Max Ernst, but the subjects come from the sphere of Medek's immediate interests - botany and zoology.

In subsequent cycles, he composed seemingly unrelated fragments of reality on the picture surface according to the surrealist principle, creating a poetic collage of them, connected by geometric elements and arrows (Infantile Landscape, 1947).

[24] The post-war psychosis of the militant communist regime, its constant haunting of nuclear conflict, political trials and Soviet gulags seemed so horrifying to him that surrealism was no longer a program, but the starting point of a new poetry that conveyed an analytical image of reality in full intensity.

[28] At this stage, the motif in the painting creates an imaginative space, the illusiveness of which is betrayed by its direct connection to the objects that escape from or conquer it against the backdrop of a cracked wall, torn and burning paper, or the sky.

Medek shared a basic existential feeling with the poets of his generation Karel Hynek and Vratislav Effenberger, authors of the contemporary black novel To Live (1952), and like some of his classmates from the Academy of Arts and Crafts, he experienced a deep creative crisis in the early 1950s.

The ruthlessly seen female character presents in expressive scenes a drama of brutal animality, sadism, fear, ugliness, endless abandonment and horror (Žerekuře I / Chicken-guzzler I, 1952, destroyed, Hot Meal, 1953).

Sometimes a labyrinth with ladders is depicted below a low horizon (Cranachesque Supralyric with an Imperialist Flower, 1953–1954) or the space is opened up by a window and a view of a wall embedded with shards of glass (Scream, 1954).

Medek smoothly continues to stylize the figure by depicting short hair in the form of stiff spikes and geometrically reducing heads and hands to squares and triangles.

The Games series in the late 1950s resulted in the increasing stylization and decorativeness of the painting, the loss of thought tension and marked Medek's most significant artistic crisis (A Walk Through the City, 1957).

[41] The gradual process of sublimation of the figure continues with the paintings Hair in the Wind (1958–1959), Young Man on the Run (1959) and Red Venus (1959), where the pictorial plane itself becomes the carrier of meaning.

[50][51] Medek's fifth creative period transitions seamlessly from the Sensitive Signals series and represents a return to figuration against the backdrop of pictorial space while maintaining the technique of structural painting.

Medek again began to make painterly sketches, testing the viability of his new method on a narrowly defined area of one subject (Glass Full of Unrest I-V, 1966).

Medek, who had been interested in Leonardo since his student days, when he discovered Fred Bérence's book, Lionardo da Vinci, Worker of Reason (1939), suggested an erotic or sadomasochistic meaning to his machines.

After his return from his first trips to the West, he states quite openly that he prefers the poverty of the East, close to the Franciscan principle, and the idea of the spiritual man as the bearer of culture ("No one will take our socialism from our souls, because we are sell-outs").

[55] He was undoubtedly influenced by the revolutionary ideas of Mao Zedong, whose Red Book, with selected quotations, became popular among leftist idealists and was available at the Chinese embassy in Prague in the late 1960s.

The same motif foreshadows the entire series The Tower Designers, in which Medek throws in a number of ironic meanings and demonstrates a critical distance from technical civilisation.

In 1968, Medek created a painting that stands out from the other cycles and was probably a reaction to the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 – Stones In the Mouth, a Bump in the Head (first published in Listy, 14 November 1968).

Medek's work concludes with the Moving Graves series, where obelisks from his early drawings for Evelyn Waugh's short novel The Loved One (1948) and motifs from his painting Shooting Range (1973) reappear, this time in red against a backdrop of black nothingness.

The paintings are constructed from elements whose secrets only the painter himself knew, and according to Linhartová, take a form that recalls the womb as a symbol of the renewing power of the universe (Moving Grave II, like a toddler, 1973).