calendario eventi  :: 

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19/2/2015

Five exhibitions

National Gallery, Prague

Kokoschka and Prague
20.02.2015 - 28.06.2015

The exhibition will present a selection of works by Oskar Kokoschka, created, for the most part, in 1934–1938 in Czechoslovakia, on loan from Czech and foreign institutions and private collections. Representative works from Kokoschka’s “Prague” period are exhibited in the framework of Czech art that also reflects his collaboration with Dr. Hugo Feigl’s Gallery and the Mánes Fine Artists’ Society. Other showcased artists include Friedrich Feigl, Bohdan Heřmanský, Willy Nowak, Karel Vogel, Vincenc Makovský, Emil Filla, František Janoušek and Josef Čapek, as well as artists exiled in Czechoslovakia – John Heartfield, Theo Balden, Kurt Lade and Johannes Wüsten.

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Sekal Studio
20.02.2015 - 31.12.2015

Sculptor Zbyněk Sekal (1923–1998) was one of the most important Czech artists of the second half of the 20th century. In 1970 he emigrated to Vienna, where he lived until his death.

The idea of transporting Sekal’s last studio in Vienna to Prague emerged shortly after the artist’s death. It was inspired by the fact that in the last months of his life he had deliberately transformed his studio into a Gesamtkunstwerk, a space conceived as the consummate work of art. The sculpture of a head that he placed at the heart of the studio is essentially a self-portrait of the artist, but it is also a death mask. It was created out of the destruction and remodelling of one of the Unstable Structures from the mid-1960s with which the artist viscerally identified. It attests to how strong he felt himself to be a part of his studio, his workshop, embedding himself in its organism through this final work.

The workshop served as his Kafkaesque hideaway, his lair, but also as a Heideggerian dwelling, a place where he formulated his being and engaged in a dialogue with his finds—phenomenologically conceived as precious beings. He also regarded his objects as dwellings—chests protecting their core, the modest nature of which he regarded as something precious, and his assembled paintings, for which he used the floor as their foundation. The opportunity to rebuild this multifaceted work at the National Gallery was made possible owing to the generous gift from Mrs. Christine Sekalová, the artist’s wife. It contains a complete collection of Sekal’s plaster sculptures from 1955 to 1997, numerous chests, carefully arranged materials, and the furnishings of the studio that Zbyněk Sekal worked in from 1980 to 1997.

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Martin Hejl & Coll. 2x100 mil. m²
20.02.2015 - 17.05.2015

It is possible that no Architecture Biennale has used extensive research and theory to shape national exhibitions to the same degree as the latest incarnation. Its authors, who applied the concept of chief curator/architect Rem Koolhaas, often arrived at surprising conclusions, which should not be forgotten. Thus, the National Gallery in Prague has re-staged the Czech-Slovak Biennale exhibition in the Veletržní Palace with an 85-member team of students, architects, philosophers and sociologists led by Martin Hejl of Kolmo.eu Studio. The project presents the development of housing complex designs realized in 1914–2014 in the former Czechoslovakia. The exhibition results from the team’s extensive research of the more than 200,000 square metres of housing built in the last century.

In six large-format billboards and a walkable map of Czechoslovakiaon a slightly raised platform, the authors unfold “several parallel stories that are intertwined and supplement one another. These stories are documented at three levels: the emergence, evolution and disappearance of prefabricated building panels as a building method in Czechoslovakia. The history of a design institute with 12,000 employees. The individual vs. the collective – the road from the Bata-style family house to collective housing schemes under communism and back to the family house”. The exhibition provides axonometric views of the factory town of Zlín, socialist Ostrava–Poruba, the new town of Most, Bratislava’s Petržalka quarter, the Velká Ohrada housing complex in Prague and the typical post-November 1989 satellite town ofJesenice, Prague’s fastest growing suburb. Apartment construction is documented by designs of the 56 largest Czech, Moravian and Slovak cities and towns presented in a walkable map of Czechoslovakia. Housing built in 1914–2014 is rendered in white, contrasting with the gray of older or functionally different buildings illustrating the extent of the past century’s apartment construction in the Czech and Slovak lands.

The most widespread types of apartment (mostly panel) houses can be seen on the Chart of the evolution of universal architecture in 1914–2014, spatially-rendered models of residential houses of groundbreaking design (both structurally and technologically). It consists of a typical Bata-style duplex and unit assembly prefabricated systems T11, G40, G57, T06B, T08B and VVÚ – ETA, which made it possible to speed up construction in the 1970s in a record manner, and the “catalogue” family house Alfa, a representative of the post-revolution trend – the return to family houses.

The eponymous book will provide more detailed information on the subject in accompanying texts as well as interviews with architects, town planners and technicians who were personally involved in creating the six largest residential complexes in Czechoslovakia. The texts are accompanied by original historical designs, photographs by Dušan Tománek and charts and drawings by Jan Šrámek and Alexey Klyuykov. Two globes from a typical children’s playground – a merry-go-round made of welded pipes and a climbing frame – are also part of the exhibition.

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Curated by Adam Budak and Martin Dostal
Stanislav Kolíbal. Drawing by Drawing
20.02.2015 - 03.05.2015

For over fifty years, Stanislav Kolíbal (b. 1925) has been one of the most prominent figures of Czech and European art. The artist’s extensive exhibition called Drawing by Drawing, shown in the Veletržní Palace’s mezzanine gallery, features Kolíbal’s drawing cycles that he has been creating from 1968 to the present. Kolíbal regards drawing as a definitive work of art, while drawings, in his mind, also generate a shift in concept or a major turning point in the artist’s creative output, presenting – in concentrated form – his approach to a particular theme and its development. The exhibition opens with his White Drawings produced between 1968-1976, in which he contemplates time and temporality, while his Illusion and Fiction series dating from 1977-1979 thematizes illusion in space. His Berlin Cycle from 1988 introduced his diversified work involving geometry, whose purpose is to seek order, concordance and interrelations. This series led to further drawing cycles, watercolours and reliefs that served the artist as a point of departure for objects arranged in space and exhibition installations. The exhibition will also examine this context of rendering drawings in the third dimension, exemplifying them by significant artworks that have either never been exhibited in the Czech Republic before, or only minimally. The exhibition is also intended to stimulate a theoretical discussion on the nature of Kolíbal’s art in the context of the international art movement, and to seek both concordances and differences with regard to the established art-historical context. This endeavour will no doubt be further enhanced by the collection of the artist’s small-sized sketches, preliminary studies, drawing concepts and initial ideas (published for the first time) that almost intimately elucidate Kolíbal’s creative process. This retrospective, unusually designed and installed by the artist himself, with him presenting the drawing as a work of art in its own right, is accompanied by a catalogue with an exhaustive autobiographical essay, where Stanislav Kolíbal focuses on the social and personal aspects of his oeuvre and artistic orientation.

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The Importance of Being a (Moving) Image
20.02.2015 - 24.05.2015

The National Gallery is going to open in Trade Fair Palace a new long-term project of the Moving Image Department with inaugurating show called The Importance of Being in a (Moving) Image. The title refers to the lecture of Dutch art theorist, video artist and Professor Emeritus of Literary Theory at the University of Amsterdam Mieke Bal that is concentrated on reflection of semiotics and ontology of the image. Opening of a new gallery space in Trade Fair Palace, based primarily on video and film, is a reaction to long lasting absence of these media in collections of modern and contemporary art of the National Gallery in Prague.

The first show is presenting works by Portuguese artists Mariana Calo and Francisco Queimadela, American artist Rachel Rose, French artist Aurelien Froment and Mieke Bal herself, who will open the show with her lecture. The Czech art scene is presented by works of Daniel Pitín and Roman Štětina.

The Moving Image Department is situated in a previously not used extraordinary space on the ground floor of Trade Fair Palace, redone for this purpose by the architectural concept of Austrian artist Josef Dabernig. Visual identity of the department was created by renowned British artist Liam Gillick whose video work and wall installation would be also present.

The exhibition is the result of a curatorial cooperation of Adam Budak, chief curator of the National Gallery in Prague, with Jan Kratochvil and Piotr Sikora.


Inauguration of a Moving Image Department

Mieke Bal: Art Moves: The Importance of Be(com)ing a (Moving) Image
20 February 2015, 7 p.m., admission free

In her key-note speech at the inauguration of a Moving Image Department, cultural theorist, art critic and filmmaker, Mieke Bal, will make a plea for the politics of movement on the basis of Henri Bergson's philosophy of the image as necessarily both material and moving. This leads to a view of images as involved in a triple movement – of the image, the viewer
in exhibitions, and the emotional intensity images generate. Using some examples of contemporary artworks that – literally – work with this triple movement, she will introduce a vision of political art that is not "about" politics but performs an intervention in "the political". The triple movement inherent in the image as such is the basis of action, activation, and
activism all at once.

The National Gallery in Prague, Trade Fair Palace, Prague 7
(The lecture will be presented in English.)


IMAGE TWISTER (part 1)
a panel discussion accompanying The Importance of Being a (Moving) Image
February 20, 2015, 5:30 pm

Josef Dabernig, Francisco Queimadela, Daniel Pitín, Roman Štětina in conversation with Jen Kratochvil and Piotr Sikora

We kindly invite you to a panel discussion accompanying the opening of The Importance of Being a (Moving) Image. To allow for a broader understanding of the exhibition, we have asked four artists to participate in a conversation that will build on several topics expressed by the works on display. The IMAGE TWISTER, named after the video by Roman Štětina (Tongue twister, super 16mm film / full HD telecine transfer, colour, sound, 5'46'') emphasises the aspect of continuity of pictures, but it can also be understood in terms of a moment of uncertainty and mistake. Within the discussion, we are going to focus on the exhibition as a whole, facing the essential question of why and how to show films in a gallery spaces. A special position in this discussion will have Josef Dabernig, who is not only a video artist but also a precise and strict scenographer and architect of spaces in which moving images are screened. His idea of a conceptual cinema was also implemented into the show The Importance of Being a (Moving) Image itself.

Josef Dabernig, born 1956. Austrian video artist and film maker. His work is characterized by emphasis on exhibition architecture with very systematic and minimalist visuality.

Marianna Caló and Francisco Queimadela, Portuguese artists born 1984 and 1985. From 2010 they work together as with media of video, installation, objects and site-specific.

Daniel Pitín, Czech artist born 1977. Main attention in his work lies in a medium of painting with references to modernist visuality, he puts the same interest also to his videos.

Roman Štětina, Czech artist born 1986. He analyses the relation between sound, spoken word and image distributed through channels of radio and TV.


IMAGE TWISTER (part 2)
a panel discussion accompanying The Importance of Being a (Moving) Image

Aurélien Froment, Liam Gillick, Rachel Rose in conversation with Jen Kratochvil and Piotr Sikora

We are also preparing another panel discussion with distinguished artists from the exhibition The Importance of Being a (Moving) Image which will take place at the end of March with Aurélien Froment, Liam Gillick and Rachel Rose. Besides the obvious questions concerning ontology and semiotics of a moving image, an analysis of visual identity of the museum will be the topic of this discussion, too. Liam Gillick is represented at The Importance of Being a (Moving) Image not only by his video work but also by his wall lettering which he adapted to create specific visual style of the Moving Image Department.

Aurélien Froment, French artist born 1976. In his work he uses different media including film, photography, and text.

Liam Gillick, British artist born 1964. His work covers a large scale of media from the large-format installations, prints, music, and text to his own curatorial projects and publishing of specialized texts.

Rachel Rose, American artist born 1986. She anchors her videos in specific space installations.

Press Contact:
Ivan Hartmann, hartmann@ngprague.cz

Opening: 20 February 2015, 7 p.m., admission free

National Gallery in Prague
Staroměstské náměstí 606/12
Tue - Sun 10am to 6pm

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