MAY: GUTfreund
Besides the works by František Kupka, Meda Mládková also donated to Prague 17 sculptures by Otto Gutfreund. The sculptor is one of the most remarkable European artists of the first third of the 20th century, yet the influence of his work is visible in the thinking on artistic creation till the present. His artistic production is divided by World War I into the period before the war, when the sculptures are based on the principles of cubism, and his period of civilistic sculptures from the 1920’s. The art theorist Kristýna Péčová will refer to this very second period when Gutfreund also designed perfume flacons to make his living and participated in public contracts. As a highlight of the night, we will exclusively exhibit one of the sculptor’s artworks from the Museum Kampa repository, displaying a part of Otto Gutfreund’s personal archive.
It is also the artist Dominik Lang, a Jindřich Chalupecký Award laureate and the head of the sculpture atelier at the Academy of Arts, Architecture & Design in Prague. He will talk about inspiration he draws from Gutfreund’s artistic production, reminding us of his exhibition from 2013 when, in the Vienna Secession, within the Expanded Anxiety exhibition, he allowed the viewers to step into Gutfreund’s Anxiety and discover what was occurring inside the cubist sculptures. All that will be completed by the reading from Otto Gutfreund diaries, edited by Jiří Šetlík in 1990’s.
Wednesday, 29th May 2019