What borders?
6. 6. - 13. 10. 2019
Vysočina Regional Gallery in Jihlava
Komensky Street No. 10
Jihlava
Curators: Ondřej Horák, Nina Jassingerová
OGV curator: Ilona Staňková
opening 6. 6. 2019 at 5 pm
What borders?,
The artworks for the exhibition were kindly lent by the following institutions: Slovak National Gallery, The Central Slovakian Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art Roudnice nad Labem, The Gallery of the Central Bohemian Region, Gallery of Fine Arts in Ostrava, Jindřichův Hradec Museum, Olomouc Museum of Art. The crucial part of the exhibition consists of artworks from the collections of Vysočina Regional Gallery in Jihlava.
Exhibiting artists
Emily Brandi DE/CZ + Elif Kalayci Flak TR/CZ, Mariana Kuryliak UA/CZ + Alena Mileva BG/CZ, Anastasia Miasnikova BY/CZ + Papševa Inna AZ/CZ, Mira Gáberová SK/CZ + Ruta Putramentaite LT/CZ, Jana Radevic BY/CZ + Ginatullina Lily RU/CZ + Nicky Shushulov BG/CZ, Ondřej Brody EC/CZ + Kristofer Paetau FI/CZ, Isrohan Alvarez MX/CZ + Anna Radeva SK/CZ, Petr Philippov RU/CZ + Larisa Gladysh RU/CZ, Veronika Leová VN/CZ + Hiep Duong Chi VN/CZ, Sujana Villafañe-Boháč VE/CZ + Aleksandrina Yordanova BG/CZ
Marie Galimberti-Provázková CZ/FR/HU, Otto Gutfreund CZ/FR, Václav Hejna CZ/FR, Luděk Holub CZ/PL/SE, Jan Kotík CZ/GB/DE, František Kupka CZ/FR, Alfons MuchaCZ/FR/US, Bohuslav Reynek CZ/FR, Koloman Sokol SK/MX/US, Josef Šíma CZ/FR, Jindřich Štyrský CZ/FR, František Tichý CZ/FR, Toyen CZ/FR
1st floor
Exhibition project What borders? responds to the current topic of migration and has two sections. The first part of the exhibition is a project based on cooperation between artists and foreigners who have been living in the Czech Republic for a long time. The second part is the curatorial selection from collections of Czech and Slovak galleries.
The aim of the first part is to connect artists or art school students with foreigners living in the Czech Republic and present the results of their work to public. The project called Prague – borders started in February 2018 with a discussion with foreigners who responded to the call mediated by the Centre for Integration of Foreigners (CIC) about taking part in a joint activity. The aim was to bring together foreigners living in the Czech Republic with representatives of Czech art scene who are originally from abroad (were born or raised there) and to provide conditions for creating a common artwork / project. Their mutual cooperation took place in the months following the discussion, the first results were presented during the 4 + 4 Days in Motion festival, which took place in October 2018 in Prague. Among the participants are women and men of all ages and social ties who come from Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Slovakia, Vietnam, Mexico or Venezuela, for example.
However, the exhibition in the Vysočina Regional Gallery in Jihlava is a much larger project. It combines works created during this collaboration with works by prominent Czech artists of modernism, especially from the first half of the 20th century. The purpose of this connection is to open up themes like international cooperation, foreign influences and motives that have been always influential not only for artists but for the whole Czech society as well.
Ondřej Horák
2nd floor
The selection of authors and artworks belonging to Czech and partly Slovak modernism followed the thematic line – crossing borders. In many cases, these were typical „journeymen“ or study stays, focused on drawing inspiration, exchanging ideas with the art world outside of the then Austro-Hungarian Empire and later Czechoslovakia. However, we were interested not only in the artistic dimension, but also and perhaps especially in the human and ideological ones. We included a fairly wide range of prominent names, from Alfons Mucha, František Kupka, Bohuslav Reynek, Toyen, via lesser-known names and artworks by Václav Hejna or Marie Galimberti-Provázková, to a native of Jihlava and emigrant from 1968, Luděk Holub.The collection presented here does not necessarily include only widely known artworks. We also wanted to show some rare works from our depositories that complement the overall picture of modernity, as it has been presented at major exhibitions by individual authors in recent years.
Marie Galimberti Provázková 1880–1951
She began her studies in Vienna in 1899 with the Austrian painter Heinrich Strehblow, then in Munich with Simon Hollósy, via whom she entered the art colony in Nagybányi, Hungary, the milieu of the so-called Hungarian Barbizon. Here she met Sándor Galimberti, whom she married and together they moved to Paris. There, among other things, she studied with Fernand Léger, and since 1911 she had been regularly attending exhibition and extensively travelling, including stays in Italy and Spain. She returned to Nagybánya several times. In 1917 she came back to Czech lands, where she gained an unexpected admirer and supporter of her work, marvelous solitaire Josef Váchal. Together they established the art formation Tvorba (Creation). In the 1920s she traveled again and in 1931 she studied at the Ukrainian Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Her work was influenced by Cubism and Expressionism, but these influences were transformed into a grounded lyrics of solid shapes and distinctive colors and light. Marie Galimberti has been a forgotten personality of Czech art life for a long time. During her lifetime, she crossed not only geographical boundaries, or the inspirational ones (her source wasn‘t only Paris as was the case of majority), but also the boundaries
of gender – critics would not take her seriously as woman influenced by Cubism and Expressionism. Only in 2011 Gallery of West Bohemia published the Madame Gali book, on the occasion of the same-name exhibition prepared by Martina Pachmanová, and properly evaluated her work.
Otto Gutfreund 1889–1927
In 1909 he went to Paris to study with Antoine Bourdelle, in the following year he traveled to England, Belgium and the Netherlands. After returning to Prague, he became a member of the Group of Fine Artists. He worked and exhibited in Prague and Berlin. His work evolved from the abstract forms that he began working with during his first stay in Paris, via the Expressionism kind of expression, its deformation and fragmentation of lines, to Cubism and its analysis of shapes. His statue Úzkost (Anxiety) from 1911 is considered the first Cubist statue. During the World War I he joined the French Foreign Legion, but as a foreigner he spent most of his time as a prisoner of war. After returning to Prague, his work became more naturalistic and he became a professor at the School of Applied Arts.
Václav Hejna 1914–1985
In 1946 he received a scholarship to stay in France, where he studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and became a member of the Surindependents group with which he exhibited. He also went on study trips to Soviet Union and Poland. After February 1948, he had to return to Czechoslovakia, where he began to get back to art, exhibiting only in 1959. In the early 1960s, his distinctive expressionist work, perceived to be of darker and more painful existence, was though deemed too provocative. In 1963 he left prison where he was placed for „unauthorized entrepreneurship” and continued his work in the following more relaxed years. On the occasion of exhibition he returned to Paris once more in 1969. A large part of his artistic heritage was found in Germany, where it was taken care of by curator Harald Tesan.
Luděk Holub 1928
A native of Jihlava. After 1945 he began his studies in Prague, but completed them at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. After 1968 he emigrated to Sweden, where his work took on more melancholic
and pessimistic character, resulting above all from the difficulties of beginning anew in a different environment and from his personal problems. The motif of dead trees is becoming a metaphor for these moods. Later, thanks to his travels in Africa, Israel and his memories of Vysočina (Highlands), his work changed and culminated again into landscapes, ecological themes, and gradually in clearer colors and what seemed to be hopefulness.
Jan Kotík 1916–2002
His work evolved from Cubism to abstraction and Conceptualism. He was influenced by both Paul Klee and Kandinsky. He was a member of Group 42 in the 1940s, reflecting the effects of war events, and thought to be close to Martin Heidegger‘s existentialism. Despite the disappearance of avant-garde groups after the communist coup of 1948, Kotík remained a believer and entered the Communist Party. It allowed him to travel to the West and return freely, even under the harshest regime in the 1950s. However, he disagreed with the idea of socialist realism and because of that he wasn’t allowed to exhibit. Therefore he – paradoxically – expanded his publishing activity. From 1947 to 1953 he lived in England. He emigrated only in 1969 when he received a scholarship to Germany, from where he did not return. In his absence he was sentenced to 3 years in prison for illegally leaving the country. He died in Berlin.
František Kupka 1871–1957
He left in 1891 to study in Vienna and then in 1895 in Paris. In parallel with his studies, since the time he was learning to become saddler, while his saddler master was also a spiritualist, he developed his interest in occultism and spiritual teachings in general. It also linked him to Alfons Mucha, whom he befriended. In Paris he came in contact with the emerging styles such as Futurism. He himself became one of the founders of Orphism, a style that emphasized the importance of intuition and interrelation of music, poetry and art. In 1931 he was one of the founders of the Abstraction-Création group. At the same time, however, he went beyond these -isms and group associations and continued with exploring light, sounds, spectral decay and, in his peak, the core of his own intensified and deepened perception of phenomena.
Alfons Mucha 1860–1939
He lived a significant part of his life in the Austro-Hungarian empire, so when this native of Moravian Ivančice unsuccessfully tried to join the Prague Academy of Arts, he moved to Vienna in 1879 without crossing the border. There, as a stage set painter, he found a customer and a patron, thanks to whom he studied in Munich and Paris. There he stayed and set up his own studio, which he shared with Paul Gaugin for some time. He lived and taught in the USA in 1906–10 and created the Slavic Epic masterpiece after returning home with the support of an American patron. He was friends with František Kupka, with whom he shared his conviction that art is here to convey spiritual experiences. Although he was an Art Nouveau artist par excellence, he himself did not identify with it. After the establishment of the republic he proposed a new state insignia. One trivia – because he was out of time, for the hundred-crown bill he used a portrait of his American patron’s daughter for the symbol of Slavia – originally for the Slav Epic.
Bohuslav Reynek 1892–1971
After graduation he went on his first trip to France. In 1923, he made a more substantial journey to Grenoble to visit poet Suzanne Renaud, whom he later married. Together they alternately lived in France and Czech lands until 1936. After the war he returned to Petrkov to his father‘s farm, which was soon nationalized. Reynek stayed there as a laborer and almost never left the house. Reynek was writer, poet, translator and artist. He felt close to Expressionist and Fauvist groups like Osma (Eight) or Tvrdošíjní (Stubborn). But in fact he didn’t belong anywhere, living in a world of his own Christian poetics, extremely humble and – because of the war and subsequent communism – existentially embedded in the marrow. In silence and true humility, though not in the surrendered humility, he created works full of subtlety and tenderness, paradoxically portrayed in an expressive way, where the real „personal Jesus“ lives and breathes in the background.
Koloman Sokol 1902–2003
Likewise the Czech art aspirants, also he left in 1932, after studying in Košice, Bratislava and Prague, for a study trip to Paris, where he personally met Picasso and Kupka. After his return he stayed
in Prague. Following the invitation of Mexican government, he went to Mexico City to set up a graphic arts department at the Academy of Fine Arts. He is now considered one of the founders of Mexican graphics. In the 1940s he lived and worked in the USA and after the war he returned to Czechoslovakia, to Bratislava, where he began teaching. However, on the occasion of his exhibition in Paris, he did not return home after the communist coup in 1948, but went back to the United States, where he remained until the end of his life. He lived very asceticly and basically never really left borders of his dwellings, first in Pennsylvania and then in Arizona, for a long time he did not even have any personal documents. Though he said about himself: „I am a globetrotter, originally from Earth, and therefore my work on Earth won’t get lost.” Sokol was an excellent draftsman, which allowed him more and more to abandon solid forms and shapes while deepening the emotional impressiveness of his scenes, whatever the subject. Ivan Jančár, author of exhibitions and publications on Sokol‘s work who visited him and made a compilation of his work, remembers that Sokol felt a great nostalgia for his homeland, though he was critical of it.
Josef Šíma 1891–1971
He began to cross borders when he fought on the fronts of World War I – in Galicia, Russia and Italy. He was also one of the founders of the left-wing Devětsil group after the war. At the beginning of the 1920s, however, he left for France, first to Basque Country, in 1923 to Paris, where he got married. He felt close to the deepest poetic interests of the Paris group Le Grand Jeu, whose members experimented with altered states of consciousness to the utmost. Metaphysics of creation and art, inseparability of poetry and fine art and the importance of light – these are the important points of his artistic life.There are echoes of Symbolism, Surrealism and motives from Greek mythology in his work. Like Toyen, he spent the rest of his life in Paris.
Jindřich Štyrský Toyen/Marie Čermínová
1899–1942 1902–1980
They met in 1922 beyond the borders of Czechoslovakia, in Dubrovnik, and lived and worked together until Štyrský‘s death. They both became members of the left-wing community of avant-garde artists, Devětsil. After leaving for Paris, they developed their own ism – Artificialism, and remained its only two representatives. In line with their strong views, they argued that artificalism meant nothing to them, but merely wanted to separate themselves from the rest of modern art, which they somehow despised. Of all the Czech artists, Štyrský openly acknowledged only Toyen. After returning to Prague, they both leaned toward Surrealism and in the early 1930s they founded the Surrealist Group and established close friendships with the Parisian surrealists. Štyrský loved the damned poets Lautréamont, Rimbaud, but also Mácha. Poet and painter were the same to him. Toyen abandoned the influence of Cubism, but also of Poetism and their own Artificialism, and felt at home with Surrealism. In her work she transcended the boundaries of consciousness and subconsciousness, the anticipated and surprising, illusion and reality. She was self-confident and equally living, crossing the boundaries of the concept of gender: She dressed as man and talked about herself in a masculine gender. Štyrský died during the war, Toyen survived the war in Prague and then finally moved to Paris.
František Tichý 1896–1961
He started to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, but in 1923 he left it for its conservatism. He then earned living by performing in pubs and cabarets and began making scenography for Švanda theater and book graphics for the Melantrich publishing house. In 1929 he set out on a trip to South America, where riots broke out, so Tichý settled in Paris and stayed there for five years. In addition to continuing in his circus-clown motifs, he was influenced by local art and environment, painted street scenes, still lifes, coffee scenes. His Parisian work and the work following immediately after his return to Prague form the top of his life legacy.
Nina Jassingerová
Post_scriptum:
— on Friday, August 9, a part of the artworks on paper will be replaced by the other ones due to the light exposure limits
— David Březina‘s Handjet font was used in the exhibition as well as in the accompanying prints. The script was inspired by the author‘s own assignment for graphic design students. David Březina, one of the most important Czech typographers, creates fonts for various language groups and cultural backgrounds. His scriptures harmonize Latin, Cyrillic, Indian, Greek, Armenian, and Arabic.