The 2020 Exhibition Plan of Prague City Gallery

The 2020 Exhibition Plan of Prague City Gallery

During the year we will present Czech and Slovak art to our public as one
interconnected concept by two artists from different generations – Rudolf
Sikora (SK) and Vladimír Havlík (CZ), as well as a Czech-Croatian project in
classical sculpture concerning the parallels between Czech sculptors and the
Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović. We are planning a second presentation of
contemporary Chinese art in the House of Photography, and last but not
least, we will focus on the current international scene in the biennial project
entitled In the Matter of Art I in collaboration with tranzit.cz.

The Colloredo-Mansfeld Palace will be subject to some reconstruction, so the
Start Up series will be replaced by artist-in-residence projects of both short-
term and permanent realizations for the public space art program. The
highlights of the next season will include a retrospective by the outstanding
Czech-American photographer Antonín Kratochvíl and an international project
on the photographic legacy of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo at the Stone Bell
House.

                         Magdalena Juříková, Director of Prague City Gallery

400 ASA: DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY
Term: 4 February – 3 May 2020, House of Photography
Curator: Josef Moucha

The exhibition offers representative examples of contemporary work by photographers Karel
Cudlín (1960), Jan Dobrovský (1960), Alžběta Jungrová (1978), Antonín Kratochvíl (1947), Jan
Mihalička (1965) and Martin Wágner (1980). The common feature in their work is the realism with
which they look at the world. However, each captures the mutability of the world in his or her own
way. These photographers from two generations share an interest in the diversity of human
communities and the various habitats in which these communities live. Along with the need to
realize their personal intentions, they are contributing to the renaissance of interest in
documentary photography in general. They have formed a group called 400 ASA, which
references the sensitivity of the film used for snapshots. The exhibition curator is Josef Moucha.

  Jan Dobrovský, Northern Bohemia Shelter for Mothers with Children, 2019

MATEJ KRÉN: MNEMOCINEMA AND AMNESITORY
Term: 18 March – 17 May 2020, Municipal Library, 2nd floor
Curator: Ivan Jančár
in association with Bratislava City Gallery

The contemporary work of the Slovak multimedia artist Matej Krén will be presented by two large
installations. The first, Mnemocinema, which evokes a symbolic “shortcut across the worlds” from
the real world to virtual reality, is a kind of metaphorical synthesis of various elements carrying
meaning, such as words, texts, characters and images, into which the physical presence of the
viewer is then projected against a seemingly endless wall of books in the background. The
second installation, Amnesitory, consists of book-objects turned into permanent “fossilized”
artifacts by means of a special technological process. This presentation will create an interesting
continuation of the Idiom column, made up of 8,000 books, which Krén installed in the lobby of
the Municipal Library in Prague in 1998.

JAN KOVÁŘÍK
Term: 1 April – 1 November 2020, Troja Château
Curator: Magdalena Juříková

As part of our presentations of sculpture at Troja Château, this time we have reached out to a
younger sculptor of the middle generation who makes colorful sculptures with biological
pedigrees. Kovářík himself speaks of them as “mycelium”, a growing cell mass. He uses all kinds
of modern acrylates and their derivatives so that his objects expand into space as smoothly as
possible. However, he treats their surfaces using a completely classical method – patiently
dotting his large works with a brush to create the illusion of a vibrating surface as much as
possible. As we do every year, one of the challenges will be the creation of a site-specific work
for the fountain in the front of the château.

Jan Kovářík, Deform-02, 2019

RUDOLF SIKORA AND VLADIMÍR HAVLÍK
Term: 22 April – 6 September 2020, Colloredo-Mansfeld Palace
Curator: Jakub Král

This joint exhibition by Rudolf Sikora and Vladimír Havlík will become a space for the mutual
confrontation of two ways of reaching the same worldview. While Sikora’s objectivization strategy
concerns the position of the individual in the cosmos, Havlík, on the other hand, turns to social
relationships built on non-spectacular gestures. Both artists share the common themes of
people’s relationships to nature and to each other, responsibility, an intimate relationship with the
world and the cosmos, and building a utopian overlap in an effort to direct our thinking about the
present towards the desired future.

At the beginning of a famous television debate by two prominent 20th-century philosophers, the
moderator said both speakers were like mountain climbers climbing the same mountain at the
same time on opposite sides. Although the exhibiting artists are from different generations and
have different backgrounds, both also seem to strive for the same thing, namely, to capture the
mutuality of co-experiencing the world and co-creating it by means of two strategies: Sikora’s
“bigger picture”, seen from above, and Havlík’s observation of minor shifts in our relationships.

   Vladimír Havlík, Attempting to Sleep, 1982, Archive of Prague City Gallery

ANTONÍN KRATOCHVÍL
Term: 13 May – 18 October 2020, Stone Bell House
Curator: Pavlína Vogelová

This retrospective exhibition of the Czech photographer Antonín Kratochvíl presents a cross-
section of a highly expressive, suggestive photographic oeuvre by one of the world’s most
prominent and significant producers of social documentary photography and photojournalism on
the nature of contemporary human society. He affects our emotions, upsets us, transforms images
with sophisticated effects, and dispenses an exact dosage of the intended resonance of the
labyrinth of the forms humanity and its averted faces.

Kratochvíl’s photographs accentuate images of deprivation, despair, alienation, pain, sadness and
misery, as well as the arrogance of power and its consequences in various parts of the world. They
present historical evidence of modern social and civilization problems of the world and military
conflicts (Afghanistan, Bosnia, the Philippines, Haiti, Iraq, Rwanda, Zaire) and capture the tragedy
of humanitarian and natural disasters or the escalated social problems of human society as such
(epidemics, disappearing cultures, devastation of the landscape, the criminality of drug dealers,
and an insight into the lives of contemporary “golden youth” in Moscow).

Kratochvíl imprints his own personal style onto portraits of show-business celebrities as well as
completely unknown, anonymous people, which taken as a whole represents an allegory that has a
specific meaning for him. By interconnecting well-known figures such as Bill Gates, Willem Dafoe,
Keith Richards, Patricia Arquette, Priscilla Presley, David Bowie, Milan Hlavsa, Pavel Landovský,
Jean Reno, Bob Dylan, Billy Bob Thornton, Vittorio Storaro, Kyle MacLachlan, Judith Godreche,
Amanda Lear and Debbie Harry with unknown faces of people from diverse backgrounds, living
through numerous reversals of fortune and gaining experience, Kratochvíl reflects the state of the
human soul in today’s world. These photos do not celebrate specific people, heroes, or celebrities.
Kratochvíl relativizes beauty and relationships to seek and find an adequate visual form for his
profound statement about the perception of humanity as the essence of our being, our personal
and social space, and finding fulfillment in life.

Born in 1947 in Lovosice, Czechoslovakia, Kratochvíl is a Czech photojournalist of international
renown. After five years of exile in Europe (1967–1972) including lifelong lessons from his time in a
refugee camp, in prison, and in the French Foreign Legion, he was humanized by his studies of art
and photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and went to the United States in
1972, where he later rose to become one of the top photographers in the world as a photojournalist
and war photographer. A crucial moment in his career came with his self-published book Broken
Dream: Twenty Years of War in Eastern Europe (1997). He has worked for prestigious American
newspapers and magazines including Rolling Stone, New York Times Magazine, Newsweek,
Mother Jones, Smithsonian, Condé Nast Travel, Geo, Playboy, Penthouse and Vogue. He has
received many international awards for his documentary photographs, such as the Dorothy Lange
Prize, the Ernst Haas Award, the Golden Light Award, the Gold Medal for Photography from the
Society of Publishing Designers in New York, the Gold ARC Award for the Best Annual Report, the
Lucie Award and World Press Photo. In the Czech Republic he was named the 2014 Personality of
Czech Photography.

Antonín Kratochvíl, Jean Reno, 2006, photograph

Antonín Kratochvíl, The Mountaineer Tomaž Humar, 2002, photograph

Josef Sudek, Female Saint from
Homole, 1935, digitally adjusted
negative, 15 × 10 cm, Photo Library of
the Institute of Art History of the Czech
Academy of Sciences, inventory No.
S 9092N © Josef Sudek, heirs. Repro
© Vlado Bohdan, Institute of Art History
of the Czech Academy of Sciences

BEAUTIES OUT OF THE DRAWER: JOSEF SUDEK AND SCULPTURES
Term: 26 May – 30 August 2020, House of Photography
Curators: Hana Buddeus, Katarína Mašterová
in association with the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the
Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague

Josef Sudek (1896–1976) devoted a significant part of his professional career to photographing
works of art. The rediscovery of this extensive, yet almost unknown, part of his oeuvre will
surprise the general public. The focus of the exhibition on statues, a theme that was close to
Sudek, will show these commissioned works within the context of his own creative work. Sudek
used to call Gothic statues of the Virgin Mary and female saints “beauties”, and he also liked to
photograph the statues “for himself”. In addition to iconic images from St. Vitus Cathedral and
“Mrs. Sculptor’s Garden”, the exhibition will feature photographs commissioned by sculptors, art
associations and publishers that have been hitherto “kept in the drawers” of the Institute of Art
History, as well as contemporary reproductions in books and magazines. The selected works
will show the tension between an artifact and its reproduction, the potential of photography to
bring art closer to the masses and photography as an original work of art.

The exhibition and accompanying publication are the output of the grant project “Josef Sudek
and Photographic Documentation of Works of Art: From a Private Art Archive to Representing a
Cultural Heritage”, initiated by Prof. Vojtěch Lahoda (1955–2019). The project is supported by
the “Applied research and development of national and cultural identity Programme” (“NAKI II”)
operated by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, identification code DG16P02M002.
Operating period: 2016–2020.

IN THE MATTER OF ART I
BIENNIAL OF CONTEMPORARY ART, PRAGUE
Term: 19 June – 20 September 2020, Municipal Library, 2nd floor
Curators: Tereza Stejskalová, Vít Havránek
in association with tranzit.cz and the ERSTE Foundation

This first biennial, In The Matter Of Art, seeks a new language and new possibilities for “unlikely
encounters”. Through the exhibited works of art, it deals with issues of coexistence in a society
where people have stopped speaking a common language. It hovers over the places where
language fails, examining contempt, irritation, fear, frustration, anger, aggression, fatigue. Feeling
that it is necessary to find a common starting point and conditions for empathy, the exhibition
focuses on the search for the causes of the emotional attitude of contemporary society. It tries to
find these causes either in the past or in the present, or it looks at them from the perspective of
possible scenarios of the future.

The biennial asks how the intimate space of interpersonal relationships and emotional life is linked
to wider social, political and economic circumstances. Emotions tend to be complicated,
inconsistent, messy, and sometimes difficult to control. How do contemporary artists treat them in
works of art? How do they happen in the relationship between art and viewers?

Obsession with the present time, the toxic present, backwardness, nostalgia, revision, modernity,
techno-optimism. At the exhibition, a real cultural battle is waged over the importance of time. Over
which image, which perceptible form will allow the lungs to plan at least one more breath with the
hope of survival, a five-year plan, the future.

Un film dramatique (Dramatic Film), 2019, France, directed by Éric Baudelaire, Courtesy LUX

XIAO QUAN
Term: 6 October 2020 – 7 February 2021, House of Photography
Curator: Lü Peng

The Chinese photographer Xiao Quan was present during all the important events of the 1980s,
when the independent art scene of China was being formed. He has consistently mapped all the
unofficial historical milestones marking the emancipation of arts communities in the northern and
southern provinces, having been an integral part of them. Today, Xiao Quan is an internationally
renowned documentary photographer and works on several projects at the same time. He travels
to remote areas of China as well as to Western metropolises and has released a number of
outstanding publications covering certain locations and people who are bound to live in material
conditions often diametrically opposed to what is commonplace. However, the question remains
whether those who are left out of civilization, struggling for their very survival and owning but a few
necessities, may live happier lives.

MONIKA IMMROVÁ
Term: 21 October 2020 – 28 February 2021, Colloredo-Mansfeld Palace
Curator: Iva Mladičová

Monika Immrová is a graduate of Jindřich Zeithamml’s Sculpture Department at the Academy of
Fine Arts in Prague. She is one of the most distinctive sculptors of her generation and, as a native
of the town of Louny known for geometric abstraction, has a strong affinity for abstract form. On the
other hand, as a person close to nature, she cannot resist combining geometric forms with organic
shapes. The bipolar identity of her concrete objects and reliefs involves an aesthetics
simultaneously reminiscent of interplanetary ships and historical industries. Immrová has elevated
concrete to a sculptural material par excellence. She works with it as often as she does with
another non-traditional material – cardboard. These purely technical commodities help her in her
quest for a streamlined, strictly-formulated spatial concept. Her domain has always been sculpture,
but in recent years she has also devoted herself to graphic art, winning the Graphic Artist of the
Year award.

                                                                          Monika Immrová,
                                                                          Head IV, 1999, wood,
                                                                          gold-plated

                                                                          Edges II, 2012,
                                                                          concrete, plaster reliefs
                                                                          on the walls

Ivan Meštrović, Miloš Obilić Paris, 1908, plaster, Atelier Meštrović, Zagreb

IVAN MEŠTROVIĆ (1883–1962)
Term: 4 November 2020 – 7 March 2021, Municipal Library, 2nd floor
Curators: Sandra Baborovská, Barbara Vujanović
in association with the Ivan Meštrović Museum

This exhibition by the Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović is returning to Prague after exactly 50
years. This time, however, it will be supplemented by works on loan from the Musée Rodin and the
Musée Bourdelle. Visitors will thus have the opportunity to also see works by August Rodin, who
was Meštrović’s friend and source of inspiration, as well as those by the renowned French sculptor
Émile-Antoine Bourdelle, Meštrović’s rival in artistic opinion.

The “South Slavic Rodin”, as Meštrović was nicknamed by Czech art critics, exhibited with the
Mánes Association of Fine Artists in 1903 and 1909 in the pavilion under the Kinsky Garden in
Prague. Meštrović, the then-leader of the Viennese Art Nouveau of the “Metzner” type, was a close
friend of Bohumil Kafka. In 1908, Meštrović left Vienna for Paris. Later he worked in Rome, where
he established a platonic relationship with the Czech Futurist artist Růžena Zátková, who became
the life model for many of his sculptures. Meštrović’s works, created for Czech diplomats and for
the the newly-established Czechoslovakia, are closely related to the Masaryk family. He portrayed
both President Masaryk and the President’s daughter, Alice.

Meštrović spent all his life coming to terms with Croatian history and identity. At the same time,
however, he was a cosmopolitan artist, as evidenced by his solo exhibition in 1915 in the V&A
Museum in London, and his exhibition in 1947 at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where he
emigrated, fleeing the Nazis. After the war, the socialist regime in Yugoslavia tried hard to win him
over to its ideology. However, Meštrović never made a permanent return to his homeland and died
in 1962 in South Bend, Indiana.

The planned Prague retrospective will deal not only with Meštrović’s oeuvre but will also feature
the broad art-historical background of the given period from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the
end of the Second World War. In terms of its program and creative team (architect: Dominik Lang,
graphic designer: Robert V. Novák) this project follows the successful exhibition The Restless
Figure – Expression in Czech Sculpture 1880–1914. New views of Meštrović’s work can be found
in the extensive catalogue with contributions from Czech, Croatian and French researchers. The
publication will also comprise unique photographs by Josef Sudek, who captured Meštrović’s
sculptures during the Prague exhibition in the Royal Summer Palace (Belvedere) in 1933.

FRIDA KAHLO: HER PHOTOS
Term: 2 December 2020 – 11 April 2021, Stone Bell House
Curator: Pablo Ortiz Monasterio

Frida Kahlo had a very special relationship with photography. Both her father and grandfather were
professional photographers, and she herself brought different uses to photography. Among other
things, she collected daguerreotypes and postcards from the 19th century, and she kept
photographs upon which she put her personal stamp, cutting things out from them, writing
dedications on them, and personalizing them as if they were paintings. She gave them to her
friends; they were memories of her ancestors; she studied her own appearance in them; and on
top of that, they became an important source of inspiration for her paintings.

                                                             Lola Álvarez Bravo, Frida Kahlo,
                                                             ca. 1944

The exhibition Frida Kahlo: Her Photos presents a number of images that have been preserved in
her estate and have been completely unknown until recently. They are now organized and divided
into six thematic sections. The exhibition does not intend to depict Kahlo’s chronological biography,
but rather to exhibit parts of the personal history of this artist, of the country and time period in
which she lived. It is a photographic collage made up of images that allow us to discover new
details from the life of one of the iconic figures of the 20th century. The 241 photographs have been
chosen and organized into six main subjects. They deal with her origins, her Blue House (Casa
blu), politics, revolution, Diego Rivera, her broken body, and her loves and friendships. These
historical documents also represent the art and specific perspectives of other artists whose
photographs are also part of the collection, such as Man Ray, Martin Munkácsi, Edward Weston,
Brassaï, Tina Modotti or Gisèle Freund, whose work has recently been exhibited in Prague. This
exhibition has been traveling, mainly on both American continents, and has been presented in
Europe so far in Portugal, Germany and Poland. The organizing agency, Terra Esplêndida,
addressed the Prague City Gallery in reference to its successful exhibition of the work of Sam
Shaw in the House of Photography in 2016–2017. From Prague the exhibition will travel to Ghent,
Belgium.

OPEN STUDIO 2020
Curators: Marie Foltýnová, Jitka Hlaváčková, Sandra Baborovská
The Start Up series in 2020 will change into an Open Studio

The Start Up exhibition series presenting young artists will be temporarily suspended in 2020 due
to the planned reconstruction of part of the Colloredo-Mansfeld Palace. Instead, Prague City
Gallery’s specialist department, in association with the public sculpture department, is setting up a
new program focusing primarily on Prague’s public spaces. As part of its residential Open Studio
Prague City Gallery will curate and host the artists selected through an open call for applicants
from abroad and at home. The outcome of the program will be a temporary work of art to be
created and installed within the boundaries of the City of Prague. The professional guarantors of
the individual outputs will be the Prague City Gallery’s curators; the technical realization and
installation of the work will be provided by the Prague City Gallery within the Art for the City
program of Prague City Hall.

The Chýnov House with František Bílek’s Studio
From May 2020 in Chýnov near Tábor
Curator: Hana Larvová

From the beginning of the 2020 season, František Bílek’s studio in Chýnov will present a small
trailer for a long-term exhibition to be held on the 3rd floor of Villa Bílek in Prague in May 2021,
which will focus on Bílek’s works inspired by his lifelong friend, the poet Otokar Březina.

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