Pavel Brázda was a maverick Czech dissident artist during the communist era. Without being overtly political, his paintings and drawings were defiant, original and, most of all, refreshingly humorous in the face of bleak totalitarianism and all the boredom it imposed.

His long-overdue retrospective at Veletržní palác coincides with the artist's 80th birthday. It presents almost 60 years of his work, created mostly during a time when he was not even supposed to be practicing his art.

Outside his circle of friends and admirers, Brázda was essentially an unknown artist on the Czech scene until the Velvet Revolution. After 1989, however, his art, especially from the 1950s and '60s, was championed (and used profusely) by the influential post-communist cultural publications Revolver Revue and Respekt.

Born in 1926 in Brno, south Moravia, Brázda descends from the famous Čapek family; his maternal grandmother was the sister of Karel Čapek, one of the most important Czech writers of the early 20th century. His family members were great collectors of Czech modern art.

Like many Czechs before World War II, Brázda was inspired by communist ideals and especially by artists with similar ideological leanings, such as Karel Teige and Záviš Kalandra and their movement Surrealism Against the Tide. Unlike Teige, however, Brázda quickly began to doubt the communists' promises, especially in light of Stalin's prewar show trials and excessive purges.

In the 1940s Brázda founded a trend called Hominism, art for and about common people. He found the inspiration for Hominist art on the streets and in the lives of ordinary citizens, as well as in Czech urban folk culture and the "surrealism of the poor," which he sought out especially in the amusement parks of his native Brno. To this day, Brázda's art shows the influence of Surrealism, though it is closer to Magical Realism.

He began art studies at the Academy of Art, Architecture and Design (VŠUP) in Prague under Professor Emil Filla, though he was expelled after a short time. He later entered the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU) but was expelled from that school following the communist takeover in 1948 because of his family background, and was forced into manual labor.

It was at AVU that he met his future wife, Věra Nováková, who was also expelled from the academy simply for associating with Brázda. She remains an unfortunately overlooked artist in her own right.

Brázda trained as a house painter and held various other manual jobs until his retirement just before the 1989 revolution. His last regular job was from 1977–87, working as a stoker in a boiler room at the first Dental Clinic at Albertov in Prague.

Despite the mundane day jobs he held throughout most of his life, Brázda never stopped painting, nor did his wife. In 1992, he became the first recipient of the magazine Revolver Revue's art award (for the year 1991), and that same year he and his wife had their first major exhibition, "Pavel Brázda and Věra Nováková — 1950s" in the huge alternative art space PKC Ženské domovy, which finally acknowledged their artistic efforts.

From his earliest efforts in the 1940s through his most recent paintings and serigraphs from 2005, Brázda's work reflects the political and social climate of the Czech lands through his own wild vision of robots, mutants and lovers under smiling suns.

At its best, Brázda's work conjures images of DC Comics from the 1950s and '60s, or Robert Crumb gone mad under the thumb of Communist Party hacks. Brázda's world portrays the old days of Prague and Brno, recreating narrow streets, factories and unique characters as lively as those found in the books of Bohumil Hrabal.

The faces on Brázda's men and women tend to have huge, bulging eyes, implying a state of ecstatic nothingness, as if brainwashed or shell-shocked from so many years of hearing Karel Gott's inane pop songs. Then there are the harsher images of soldiers in militaristic poses, appropriately bleak.

In the early 1990s, the black humor in Brázda's work, particularly from the 1950s and '60s, resonated strongly in the upbeat atmosphere of the post-revolutionary period. These older works, with their abundance of large astronauts, motorcycle racers, Frankenstein-like monsters, grotesque men and sci-fi super vixens are the standouts in his retrospective.