Preparing for Darkness, Vol. 8
[vc_row content_text_aligment="" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no"][vc_column][vc_raw_html]JTVCem9icmF6X2RhdHVtX2tvbmFuaSU1RA==[/vc_raw_html][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row content_text_aligment="" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no"][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text="Preparing for Darkness, Vol. 8" use_theme_fonts="yes"][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row content_text_aligment="" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no"][vc_column][vc_column_text]About the exhibition / curator’s statement It’s time for a divorce. A divorce from a type of contemporary art and especially painting that seems suspended in eternal post-modernity; one that, through a marked lack of artistic skill, can’t seem to reference anything but itself. This state of modern art can be experienced as a “pluriverse” of styles, citations, and allusions without a semblance of internal coherence. With my exhibition series “Preparing for Darkness”, I would like to pose a counter concept. The 8th edition of the series takes place at Museum Kampa and presents 13 artists - mostly painters - who stand as examples of a generation marked by an exceptional intellectual approach to artistic practices. The resulting profound examination of art history, paired with extraordinary artistic skill, can be seen as veritable and imminent, as they each, through their own unique style, offer a real, pictorially comprehensible and perceptible dialogue between past art and their own inscribed emotional world. What unites them is a resurrection of melancholy, which returns to highlight the magical in a viewing experience. In that sense, my chosen metaphor “Preparing for Darkness'' is meant to describe both melancholy and the state of the world. Uwe Goldenstein Artists Nicola Samorì (I), Enrico Minguzzi (I), Flavia Pitis (RO), Radu Belcin (RO), Adela Janska (CZ), Richard Stipl (CZ), Daniel Pitín (CZ), Adam Magyar (H), Attila Szűcs (H), Inna Artemova (D), Adam Bota (A), Liu Langqing (CH) & Rafael Megall (ARM / in collaboration with Demetrio Paparoni) [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Jan MERTA – Petr VESELÝ
[vc_row content_text_aligment="" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no"][vc_column][vc_raw_html]JTVCem9icmF6X2RhdHVtX2tvbmFuaSU1RA==[/vc_raw_html][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row content_text_aligment="" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no"][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text="Jan MERTA - Petr VESELÝ" use_theme_fonts="yes"][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row content_text_aligment="" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no"][vc_column][vc_column_text]Both Jan Merta and Petr Veselý are prominent artistic personalities belonging to the generation of artists who entered the art scene in the 1980s. Although they are almost the same age (Jan Merta was born in 1952, Petr Veselý in 1953), their professional careers have been quite different. After having graduated from the Prague Academy, Petr Veselý returned to his native Brno in the late 1970s, where he worked as a secondary school and university teacher at various art schools. Jan Merta did not graduate from the Academy until several years later. Since the 1990s, he has been heavily involved in gallery operations and his paintings have attracted the attention of foreign gallerists. While Petr Veselý tends towards maximum abstraction and simplicity, Jan Merta works with varied colours and develops a certain narrative in some of his paintings. Even in his themes, Merta may seem more ‘playful’ than Veselý, but this is far from setting the rule. Both artists also like to step outside the field of what one is expecting of them. To both of them, painting is, above all, an expression of something that cannot be communicated in any other way. In their understanding, a painting has meaning only when it cannot be retold, when every brushstroke has its own meaning and importance. Their joint exhibition does not aim at looking for external similarities in their canvases; rather, it seeks to draw attention to the internal affinity of their respective works. It is not about their sharing certain themes, but about their sharing the elementary approach to painting as a unique language of knowledge and naming the surrounding world. The selection of the exhibited paintings was guided by the leitmotif of home, with all its intimacy and spontaneity,
Zdenka RUSOVÁ: Between the mysterious and the obvious
[vc_row content_text_aligment="" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no"][vc_column][vc_raw_html]JTVCem9icmF6X2RhdHVtX2tvbmFuaSU1RA==[/vc_raw_html][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row content_text_aligment="" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no"][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text="Zdenka RUSOVÁ: Between the mysterious and the obvious" use_theme_fonts="yes"][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row content_text_aligment="" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no"][vc_column][vc_column_text]Zdenka Rusová is a graphic artist, sketch artist, teacher, the first female professor of graphic art in Norway and first female rector of an art school in all of Scandinavia. Working in ink and pen drawing, as well as the graphic techniques of drypoint and etching, she has also tried other printing techniques and painting. In Norway, she sparked a great discussion about the possibilities of teaching, which led to the reform of the local art education. She was born in Prague on 21 July 1939. In a number of interviews, Rusová says she was born with Hitler and grew up with Stalin. She graduated from UMPRUM in the studio of Antonín Strnadel, specializing in book illustration. The first important exhibition of Zdenka Rusová’s work was organized by Jaromír Zemina in October 1966 at Galerie mladých. Her first exhibition at the Galerie mladých in 1966 was seen by Ole Henrik Moe, a Norwegian art critic and later director of the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Høvikodden, who recommended the artist to obtain her first grant for a stay in Norway. She was enchanted by this northern country, with its rugged landscape and sea on the distant horizon, and in 1970 she returned there to settle permanently. In the interim period, she continued her education at the academy in Stuttgart. In Czechoslovakia, she made paintings of ambivalent female heads with mysterious smiles, and worked on print graphics revolving around circus motifs. In 1967, she created an extensive series of graphic prints featuring female heads in various in profile, some broken and others ‘unlaced’. Following this series, she drew heads without hair, and that appeared rather like lumps growing from the shoulders. In her Norwegian stage, she created abstracted paintings, adding
From Lines to Matter / Vojtěch Kovařík
[vc_row content_text_aligment="" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no"][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text="8/6 - 8/9 2024" font_container="tag:h3|text_align:left" use_theme_fonts="yes"][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row content_text_aligment="" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no"][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text="From Lines to Matter / Vojtěch Kovařík" use_theme_fonts="yes"][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row content_text_aligment="" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no"][vc_column][vc_column_text]If our destinies are predetermined, what place does that leave for free will? For luck? For chance? Vojtěch Kovařík confronts the issue in his paintings – and with the current exhibition at Museum Kampa, he steps into the third dimension: the smooth surface of his paintings are accompanied by reliefs and sculptures, with the artist’s path leading from lines that divide the canvas to sculptural works. The themes in this exhibition are universal, touching on the very foundations of Euro-American civilization. Even today in the third millennium, ancient myths, gods and goddesses, Titans, heroes and heroines are all still relevant, their robust forms exceeding the monumental format of the paintings. We may see them as archetypes, whose stories and actions have served since time immemorial to mark the limits and possibilities of our own passage through life and search for meaning. These oversized heroes are megalopsychoi, the great-souled men, the first individualities. Perhaps that is why we may only catch a glimpse of them through the window frame of the canvas, not in their entirety. Sisyphus sinks under the weight of his actions. The parting lovers Eros and Psyche suffer the burden of predestination. The labours of Heracles speak to the fulfilment of destiny, the first of these being to train the Nemean lion. Just as Zeus’s son made himself invulnerable wrapped in his lion skin, so too does the painter face more and more challenges that seem impossible to overcome. The reduced setting of the paintings consists of a stylized interior and Mediterranean landscape, fertile and arid, dusk or dawn, inlets, deserts, and oases. The artist’s approach is authentic: a unique syncresis of the influences of antiquity, modernity, and the digital present.
