• He studied in the studios of Jiří Sopko and Michael Rittstein and graduated from Painting Studio I under Robert Šalanda. He went on to study at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht in the Netherlands.
• In 2022 he was selected as one of the artists of the TFC Artist Residency in Miami and in 2023 he took part in the Gray Nivas Art Residency in New York
• Among his notable solo shows are presentations at Volesky & Gallery and Pragovka Gallery in Prague, at OFF/FORMÁT in Brno and at THINK+feel Contemporary in Miami.
   

Filip Švehla belongs to the generation of young contemporary Czech abstract painting. At the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague he studied in several studios: those of Jiří Sopko and Michael Rittstein, and he graduated from Painting Studio I under Robert Šalanda. He continued his studies at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht in the Netherlands, and once he had finished he travelled through Spain and India, journeys that strongly shaped his work. In 2017 he completed a residency at the Summeracademy Venice in Italy, in 2022 he was selected as one of the artists of the TFC Artist Residency in Miami and in 2023 he took part in the Gray Nivas Art Residency in New York. Between 2014 and 2021 he was twice a finalist of the Kunstpreis der Leinemann-Stiftung, of the Josef Hlávka Foundation Award and of the 14th Critics' Prize for Young Painting. Among his notable solo shows are presentations at Volesky & Gallery and Pragovka Gallery in Prague, at OFF/FORMÁT in Brno and at THINK+feel Contemporary in Miami.

Filip Švehla's current work points unmistakably towards abstraction. He arrived there through a long process by way of the figurative motifs he pursued while studying at the Academy of Fine Arts. Those motifs still would not let him give shape to the images that had lodged in his head during his year in Valencia. "In Valencia I began to notice light and a more radiant sense of colour. In the architecture I studied geometric building structures. At first I translated what I saw into objects, then I painted over them, destroyed them and looked for new shapes," Filip says of his approach. 

In his paintings Švehla follows the relationships between fields of colour closely, laying them side by side in clean geometric compositions or overlapping them, layering them and letting them float one across another. Sometimes he plunges into compositionally complex scenes that recall layered views down streets; at other times he deliberately keeps to the linearity and flatness of the geometric line. His frequent references to architecture are unmistakable, and he abstracts them, pares them down and assembles them in a two-dimensional space of his own scale. The canvas becomes for him a kind of reconstruction of spatial objects on a flat surface. "I realised that I can do anything. Now I try to stay in a state of cheerful experimentation," Filip says. He brings that positive frame of mind to all the series he works on at once.