“In Defiance” features photographs by Jiří Hampl and artworks by Mikuláš Medek and Jan Koblasa from the years 1959–1963 that recall these artists’ legendary exhibition in Teplice in August 1963 – in the château’s riding school, in an exhibition hall named after Czechoslovakia’s first communist president, Klement Gottwald. For Czechoslovak modern art in the postwar period the exhibition was something quite unprecedented, and it marked a turning point. It was extraordinary that it was held at all, despite an earlier prohibition, which was thanks to an easing of the state’s ideological control between April and mid-September 1963. This was the doing of Čestmír Císař, a secretary on the communist party’s central committee who was responsible for the mass media, education, culture and international relations. It was the first time these artists were able to show their existential abstract work, which was so disfavoured by the communist regime, to the general public. Together with Věra Linhartová and František Šmejkal, the exhibition’s curators, they devised an impressive and conceptually focused installation of paintings and sculptures that broke radically with the excessive caution and hypocrisy of the Czechoslovak art scene, making it an unmissable event.

To produce a similar interplay of ideas, the present exhibition has prioritised the artworks that were shown back then; where these were unavailable alternatives have been selected from the same period. The creative and conceptual aspects of these works prompt us to pause and reflect, and they clarify, often with an ironic humour, the prevailing emotions, anxieties, hopes and fears of that time, which are not dissimilar to what we are experiencing today.

In the centenary year of Mikuláš Medek’s birth, this exhibition seeks to pay homage to art and to the courage of these two artists.

In the captions, the artworks on display in Teplice in 1963 are indicated by the numbers in square brackets, referring to the list of artworks in the Teplice catalogue, together with any differences in their titles or dates.