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16/6/2011

Vera Janouskova / Shan Shan Sheng / Abstraction and Atonality

Museum Kampa - the Jan and Meda Mladek Foundation, Prague

Věra Janoušková
Intuition and Order

Curator Jiří Machalický

The opening of the Věra and Vladimír Janoušek Museum, which will take place in the fall of this year in the former atelier of both artists, is preceded by the exhibition of Věra Janoušková in Museum Kampa. On display is a remarkable ensemble of collages and asbestos and welded sculptures. Věra Janoušková is known more as a sculptor, but her collages, of which she created hundreds, are on the same level as her sculptures. The first collages were textiles, sewn from patches of material. Later she created collages using the more traditional material, paper. Similar themes that are used in her sculptures and objects appear in her collages. In a range of forms and variations the artist fashioned heads, figures and symbols, and sometimes she even leaned towards abstraction. She used various materials to create her collages (coloured and pierced papers, sections taken from poster billboards, motifs cut out from magazines, cuttings and translucent tissue paper). A majority of the collages are completed and enlivened with drawings in pencil, pen or marker. The Věra and Vladimír Foundation takes care of a fairly extensive collection, which is comprised of several hundred diverse collages and several sculptures from her early period up until works created just before the author’s passing.
Until August 14, 2011

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Until August 31, 2011

Shan Shan Sheng
The Open Wall Project

Shan Shan Sheng's Open Wall is a large-scale glass installation re-interpreting a section of the Great Wall. Consisting of 2,208 glass bricks that correspond to the years of the Great Wall’s Construction, the Open Wall Project is approximately 20 m (55ft) long, 2 m (6ft) high and 55 cm (2ft) deep. Sheng uses translucent Venetian glass, a medium she has worked with extensively, to allude to dynastic Chinese architecture. Warm colors of red, gold and yellow used intermittently in layers making this an exquisite luminous structure. This creation of a modern work of art inspired by a great Chinese monument ultimately will represent the newfound openness of contemporary China: A country that wishes to retain its rich cultural heritage while being open to global economy and the international exchange of ideas. With her Open Wall Shan Shan Sheng presents a temporary threshold between water and sky, past and present and the walled cities of Venice and China, marking this critical intersection of Chinese and Western cultures.

Shan Shan Sheng's Open Wall participated in the 53rd Venice Biennale 2009 and World Expo Shanghai 2010 to great acclaim. Starting from Venice, not only the location where the project was created and first exhibited but also Marco Polo's birthplace, the Open Wall are travelling and stop at several cities reaching important paths for cultural, commercial and technological exchange en route to China, Prague is one of the them.

"The wall does not become a barrier but it is connected to different cultures, races and different values”, explains the artist. The project's symbolic journey from West to East is intended at further stressing the attempt for cultural and historical unification through contemporary art.

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Until 31. 7. 2011

Abstraction and Atonality
Wassily Kandinsky, František Kupka, and Arnold Schönberg

This exhibition features three very important individuals of the art world - Wassily Kandinsky, František Kupka and Arnold Schönberg and will be the highlight of the year. Wassily Kandinsky and Arnold Schönberg are something very unique for Prague and to exhibit these artists together has an internal logic. The exhibition’s concept is based on the examination of the relationship between abstraction and atonality, whose principles are related. Indeed, patterns of music and visual compositions were to a large extent interlinked at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Museum Kampa houses one of the largest private collections of works by Frantisek Kupka with over 200 works stemming from his early years until his passing in 1957. This collection fully represents works from the time period when the artist moved into purely abstract expression, which had a very difficult evolvement in Frantisek Kupka. His development to this form of art was completely different to that of other pioneers of abstract art. Wassily Kandinsky matured to abstraction at the same time, but based on a very different thought processes. He was inspired by natural processes and their complicated transformations. Where Arnold Schönberg connected musical discoveries with artistic, even though the axis and the main contributor lies in music.

In addition, this exhibition is included in the Prague Spring Music Festival programme, and a concert focusing on this exhibition will be held in Museum Kampa on May 31, 2011. This cooperation with Prague Spring gives the exhibition a new dimension and will attract a lot of interest and a wide range of visitors.

The project emphasizes that it stems from the Munich concert of Schönberg’s composition in 1911, where Kandinsky was present. The exhibition shows how music inherently influenced the development of abstract painting, but of course there exists a retroaction. Also during this period, that is around 1910, the long process of mutual penetration of various artistic fields begins the erasure of boundaries between them, the convergence of principles on which they are based.

In this sense the exhibition focuses on one of these possible relationships and at the same time builds on the exhibition titled the Origins of Abstract Art, which took place several years ago in Paris. The public will thus have at the time of the Prague Spring a unique opportunity to see this remarkable exhibition, which will naturally merge with the substantially transformed permanent exhibition of Frantisek Kupka Museum Kampa. The exhibition catalogue will be published in Czech and English.


Milan Grygar
Exhibited is a selection of monumental paintings and acoustic drawings. As part of the exhibition the famous Prague Spring Festival along with the MoEns Ensemble will be holding a concert based on Milan Grygra’s acoustical scores. The concert will be held on May 26 in Museum Kampa. Tickets are still available at Pražské jaro.

Image: Věra Janoušková

Marketing and Public Relations
Jana Pelouchová Tel.: +420 257 286 144 E-mail: jana.pelouchova@museumkampa.cz
Kateřina Třísková Tel.: +420 257 286 144 E-mail: katerina.triskova@museumkampa.cz

Museum Kampa - the Jan and Meda Mládek Foundation
U Sovových mlýnů 2 118 00 Praha 1 – Malá Strana
Open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Admission:
Adults CZK 280
Students (with student I.D.), seniors CZK 140
Family (2 adults + max. 3 children under 15) CZK 420
Groups (min. 6 person) CZK 220/person

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