[vc_row content_text_aligment="" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no"][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text="Václav Sokol – Abundance" use_theme_fonts="yes"][vc_custom_heading text="28 March-24 May 2026" font_container="tag:h3|text_align:left" use_theme_fonts="yes"][vc_column_text]The universe of Václav Sokol is composed of simple images. Rain falling on the landscape, a ship on the sea, light piercing the darkness, a cluster of grapes, or a glass on a table—these modest motifs are familiar from biblical stories as well as from our own lives. In Sokol’s drawings the old language of symbols comes alive again, a language in which the whole world was once told. Archaic metaphors connected with spiritual and religious experience repeatedly became, in the twentieth century, a language of revolt, an island of resistance. Recall the Madonna of mute pain by Karel Kryl, the sung sermons of Svatopluk Karásek, folk songs interpreted by Jaroslav Hutka, or the poems of Ivan Martin Jirous. Painter, draftsman, book designer, signatory of Charter 77, publicist, and curator Václav Sokol was born on September 19, 1938, in Prague. He grew up in a house in Břevnov with an original layout, built for the family by his father, an architect. The house later became the address of the philosopher Jan Patočka, the first spokesperson of Charter 77; it was here that underground seminars were held. Sokol studied at the School of Applied Arts (today known as Hollar Art School). Because of his background and views, he was prevented from pursuing further education. He worked as a librarian, graphic designer, and porter. He illustrated and designed books, organized and opened exhibitions for friends, and wrote articles about art. In both his illustrations and independent drawings, he followed a path of simplification, reduction, and geometry. He works primarily with pastel and charcoal; earlier drawings were created in ink, using pen or brush. A firm, concentrated line, its repetition in varying intensity, and the construction of form through pressure within the line

[vc_row content_text_aligment="" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no"][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text="Václav Špála: Flowers" use_theme_fonts="yes"][vc_custom_heading text="14 February–17 May 2026" font_container="tag:h3|text_align:left" use_theme_fonts="yes"][vc_column_text]Although floral still lifes constitute the most extensive part of Václav Špála’s oeuvre, they have never before been presented in a dedicated exhibition. Previous exhibitions and the specialist literature have mostly dismissed them as a less interesting segment of his work, without attempting to highlight their specific qualities. However, the perspective offered by contemporary art enables us to re-evaluate aspects of Špála’s floral still lifes that modernism regarded as problematic. Variations on a theme, craftsmanship and temporality gain fresh and appealing significance in the context of contemporary art. In August 2025, one hundred and forty years had passed since Špála’s birth and, in May 2026, it will be eighty years since his death. Yet these anniversaries have been more or less forgotten, even though it has been twenty years since his last major exhibition at the National Gallery. Museum Kampa is preparing an exhibition focusing exclusively on Špála’s floral still lifes in early 2026. This exhibition will run from mid-February (opening on Friday, 13 February 2026) until mid-May 2026 on the upper floor of the Sova’s Mills building in Prague. Over eighty paintings from public and private collections will be on display, presenting a selection of Špála’s works from the 1920s to the 1940s. Špála himself graded his paintings and, out of the nearly eight hundred floral still lifes he painted, he only gave thirty-two his highest rating of “rare” or “primissima”. Ten of these will be on display at the exhibition.  Curator: Jan Skřivánek For an interview with the exhibition curator on ART+, see the link here. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

[vc_row content_text_aligment="" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no"][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text="Valerian Karoušek, Jiří Novák – Bowels of the Earth, Wings, Distant Shores" use_theme_fonts="yes"][vc_custom_heading text="14. 2. – 17. 5. 2026" font_container="tag:h3|text_align:left" use_theme_fonts="yes"][vc_column_text]Above all, the opportunity to exhibit the works of VALERIAN KAROUŠEK (1929–1970) and JIŘÍ NOVÁK (1922–2010) is an opportunity to recall the creative principles with which both sculptors contributed to the new figurative and constructivist tendencies in Czech art in the 1960s. It also conveys the vibrancy of a space for sharing contemporary ideas and exploring different themes and creative approaches to working with new materials. However, it also recalls the powerful life stories of both artists, which were shaped by historical events and the political circumstances in the country. Both artists studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and were members of the M 57 group. They participated in the Czechoslovak pavilion exhibition at the 1958 World Exhibition in Brussels, exhibited at the Socha 1964 (Sculpture 1964) and Socha a město (Sculpture and City) outdoor exhibitions in Liberec in 1969, and created a number of sculptures for urban space. They both found artistic inspiration in the natural environment and in the latest technical possibilities of modern civilisation. Valerian Karoušek combined the substance of stone worked by natural forces with industrial metal fragments and constructions in his sculptures, and he was also interested in the sculptural possibilities of experimenting with plastic materials. He naturally combined his artistic endeavours with his lifelong interest in mountaineering and fascination with the earth element.  The current exhibition also commemorates the tragedy of the Czechoslovak mountaineering expedition to the Peruvian Andes in 1970, which cut short his successful career as a sculptor. Jiří Novák based the expressive effect of his works on his natural interest in constructions and mechanisms, his romantic perception of reality and his brilliant ability to compose spatial

[vc_row content_text_aligment="" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no"][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text="Jaroslava KURANDOVÁ & Zdeněk RYBKA " use_theme_fonts="yes"][vc_custom_heading text="14. 2. – 17. 5. 2026 " font_container="tag:h3|text_align:left" use_theme_fonts="yes"][vc_column_text] Museum Kampa presents the work of a pair of artists bound together by fate—the married couple Zdeněk Rybka (1938) and Jaroslava Kurandová (1936–2024). They met in secondary school, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, married, divorced and then married again. Very similar, in fact, to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.             During the 1960s, they replaced academic figurative painting and its austere, subdued tones with geometric rigour and a broad colour spectrum. They became members of the Klub konkretistů (Club of Concretists), exhibiting with the group at numerous venues at home and abroad. Using smooth nitro‑lacquered hardboard and plexiglass, Jaroslava Kurandová carried her work into three‑dimensional space. Zdeněk Rybka experimented with electrography. With this technique, photographic impressions of objects on a photosensitive surface are, once developed, surrounded by a glowing halo or corona. The electric discharge lends the electrographs an almost mystical dimension. Several surprising objects were also created, many of them designed to be hung.             After the August 1968 invasion, both artists withdrew from Prague, stepped back from their own creative work and devoted their energies to teaching at art schools. They did not return to their artistic work until the late 1980s. Zdeněk Rybka introduced a new direction he called Vântîl, attracting several followers. It incorporated a measure of absurdity and a knowingly irreverent tone. Jaroslava Kurandová pressed slender metal or plexiglass strips onto canvas in parallel rows. These conveyed a sense of movement and energy. Her work always bore a sense of civic engagement, whether political or environmental. Rybka returned to expressive figurative painting, though his work remained grounded in a geometric framework.             The exhibition restores to the narrative of art history two creators whose lives were profoundly shaped by historical events. If

[vc_row content_text_aligment="" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no"][vc_column][vc_column_text] Permanent exhibition [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row content_text_aligment="" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no"][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text="Stanislav Kolíbal 100" 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]Stanislav Kolíbal (* 1925) is one of the most significant figures of Czech post-war art. In the context of world art, one can find parallels in his work to American minimalism and Italian arte povera, but his work grows from different roots and develops in the spirit of its own internal logic. Kolíbal, as demonstrated by his book illustrations and early works, is a sovereign draughtsman and model maker, but since the 1960s, questions of geometry and space have been central to his drawings and sculptures. The core of his work, however, is not form in itself but the tension between order and chance, duration and transience, being and emptiness.   Meda Mládek, the founder of Museum Kampa, has followed and collected Kolíbal's work since her first visits to socialist Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s. She purchased the artist's works through the state-run Art Center as well as the New York based gallery OK Harris, where Kolíbal had four individual exhibitions during the 1980s. Not all of the works that she acquired over the years became part of Museum Kampa, but it is nonetheless a fairly large and representative collection, with a focus on drawings and sculptures from the 1970s.   The Stanislav Kolíbal 100 exhibition is a reminder of the artist's upcoming 100th birthday, which he will celebrate in December. The exhibition is planned to run until at least February of next year and its composition will be renewed during its run in order to present Kolíbal's works as widely as possible. The connection with the permanent exhibition of paintings by František Kupka is quite deliberate, although the link between Kupka's abstractions and Kolíbal's works is not direct. Stanislav Kolíbal, like Kupka, is one of the true world artists of Czech origin. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

[vc_row content_text_aligment="" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no"][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text="Pavel Rudolf" use_theme_fonts="yes"][vc_custom_heading text="24. 1. - 22. 3. 2026" 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_column_text]Pavel Rudolf (born 1943 in Brno) is one of the most significant representatives of conceptual abstract art. His natural sense of connecting rational thinking and intuition soon resulted in a specific artistic opinion based on "‘the purity of the initial concept and a focus on the viewer’s mind and intellect’, as the art theorist Jiří Valoch aptly assessed. The exhibition at the Kampa Museum showcases a selection of Rudolf’s work from the 1960s to the present day, with a particular focus on his paintings. In his earliest paintings, he straddles the boundary between figurative art and abstraction by drawing on remnants of human figures and transforming them into concise artistic compositions. These paintings were precursors to compositions approaching totemic symbols, built on a language of stylised zoomorphic, anthropomorphic or biomorphic forms (Bez názvu [Untitled], 1966). During the 1970s and 1980s, Rudolf created paintings on paper, combining rational elements such as transformation, determination, spatial progression and projection with emotionally charged, expressive painting. These works address the processes of decay and explosion, or conversely, intergrowth and extension. Examples include the medium-sized paintings on cardboard from the late 1970s, such as Podivná geneze (Strange Genesis, 1978) and Moře – Planeta (Sea – Planet, 1978), as well as the large-format paintings on paper or canvas blinds from the second half of the 1980s. An important formal counterbalance to these expressive pieces is the series of works on paper Bez názvu I–VIII (Untitled I–VIII, 1988), in which the artist repeated and arranged stripped-down geometric shapes to create radical rhythmic structures.  Since 1998, Pavel Rudolf has worked continuously in the medium of classical acrylic-on-canvas painting. In these neo-constructivist paintings, he builds on his earlier interest in transforming geometric shapes by moving points along set

[vc_row content_text_aligment="" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no"][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text="Cubist Collection in the Gallery of West Bohemia in Pilsen" use_theme_fonts="yes"][vc_custom_heading text="1. 11. 2025 - 1. 2. 2026" font_container="tag:h3|text_align:left" use_theme_fonts="yes"][vc_column_text]The exhibition showcases one of the most impressive collections of Czech Cubism, curated by the Gallery of West Bohemia in Pilsen, which was established in 1953. The systematic development of the collection began in the early 1960s under the Gallery’s first director, Oldřich Kuba, who was in office from 1954 to 1985. His vision as a collector and his determination fundamentally shaped the character of the entire institution.  Kuba’s efforts were fostered by two exhibitions that contributed significantly to the revival of interest in the Czech avant-garde in Czechoslovakia: Zakladatelé moderního českého umění (Founders of Modern Czech Art), organised in Brno in 1957 and repated in Prague in 1958; and the monographic exhibition of Bohumil Kubišta’s œuvre (Prague, 1960; repeated in Brno, 1960–1961). These projects stimulated the public rehabilitation of modern art, which had been suppressed during the Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes. They also inspired Oldřich Kuba to develop a new acquisition strategy focused on works by Czech Cubist artists and the Czech avant-garde as such. He began to purchase these works systematically for the Pilsen collection. Oldřich Kuba was particularly fascinated by Kubišta’s work. This affinity resulted in a meticulously organised and very active acquisition campaign, which he called ‘Operation Kubišta’. Kuba approached private collectors who had loaned works by Kubišta to his monographic exhibition, gradually acquiring key pieces by this seminal Czech Cubist artist. These collectors included Olga Scheinpflugová, an actress at the National Theatre and the widow of Karel Čapek; Jarmila, the widow of the painter Josef Čapek; the writer and playwright František Langer; the painter František Muzika; the publisher Rudolf Škeřík; Bohumil Kubišta’s cousin, František; and the painter Jan Zrzavý. Subsequently, Kuba built up a representative