The painter, installation artist, and musician, who publicly performs under the pseudonyms KW, Q:, or Ewski, is one of the most original local visual artists of the last thirty years. Born in 1959, he entered the art scene in the early 1990s. From the beginning, his unique approach included a specific way of bringing the heritage of classical figurative painting into contemporary art. He responded to the ironic distance of the 1990s postmodernism with seriousness and metaphorical symbolism. In his first creative decade, he pursued the subjects such as death and fear, and we can thus see his works from the 1990s as a response to the legacy of Romanticism. Later, he explored the extent to which a painting could carry a moral message without falling into the trap of didacticism. In the last decade, he reached the very edge of this experiment: he deliberately let his paintings sound like comments on the dismal condition of Czech society. In all this, however, KW has always emphasized the role of the painterly form. The exhibition “Once Upon a Time” presents the first cross–section of his hitherto oeuvre and is accompanied by the first survey monograph devoted to his art.