Zdenek Sykora @ Galerie Zdenek Sklenar, Prague - "Colour Gardens" Exhibition

Zdeněk Sýkora – Colour Gardens

Galerie Zdeněk Sklenář, Prague

Through 12 April 2025

The exhibition Colour Gardens recalls one of the significant stages of the artistic development of the painter ZDENEK SYKORA (1920–2011) who is primarily know as the author of structures and lines. Galerie Zdeněk Sklenář is exhibiting the painter‘ cycle Gardens which includes the collection of artworks from 1959–1961. The paintings illustrate the artist’s transition from a realistic depiction of nature towards abstract compositions which later evolved into structures. According to Pavel Kappel, an art historian, this rather short period of three years forms “a fundamental turning point in Sýkora’s artwork”. Henri Matisse whom he got to know when visiting the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg in 1959 affected the artist’s shift towards Fauvist painting. In the catalogue, which was published on the occasion of Zdeněk Sýkora’s 90th anniversary, Pavel Kappel observes: “We call the direct outcome of the Matisse’s lesson, the series of coloured paintings, the Gardens on the basis of the prevailing motif, even if we can include some paintings which he had begun before the crucial trip... or even paintings with a different motif altogether – Tree, Autumn Forest...” 

The author of the exhibition, Lenka Sýkorová, the wife and collaborator of the artist, who is the closest to Zdeněk Sýkora’s artwork, selected more than thirty artworks for the exhibition in Galerie Zdeněk Sklenář. Besides paintings from private collections, there are some on loan from Galerie Benedikta Rejta in Louny, National Gallery in Prague and two of them were loaned by a private collector in Munich. At the exhibition, of which architect is Josef Pleskot, there are artworks the artist considered crucial such as Black Garden (1958), Garden (1959), Autumn Forest (1960), two paintings called Blue Garden (1959 and 1960), Garden (with a Square) (1960), Garden/Composition (1961). 

Lenka Sýkorová emphasises that the paintings from the Gardens cycle represent the culmination of Sýkora’s landscape work from the 1950s and that they are the proof of his colourist talent and at the same time, they form the confirmation of his further heading towards abstraction and the condition for finding his own way. 

GALERIE ZDENEK SKLENAR - PRAGUE

Schönkirch Palace - Mikulandská 7, Prague 1 – New Town

www.zdeneksklenar.cz

Zdeněk Sýkora – Colour Gardens

Galerie Zdeněk Sklenář, Prague 

4 February - 12 April 2025

Milan Dobes @ Olomouc Museum of Art - "A Celebration of Colour, Light and Movement" Exhibition - About the Artist + Artworks

Milan Dobeš 

A Celebration of Colour, Light and Movement

Olomouc Museum of Art

March 20 - September 7, 2025

Milan Dobeš 

Target, 1960

Vertical Lights, h 67 x w 51 cm

© Svetlik Art Foundation

Milan Dobeš  

Waves, 1960

Painting matt oil, sololite, 125 x 186 cm

© Svetlik Art Foundation

A retrospective exhibition of Milan Dobeš (*1929), a pioneer of global kinetic and constructivist art, will be presented by the Olomouc Museum of Art (Czechia). Visitors will gain a deep insight into the life and work of this artist, who exhibited alongside art icons such as Warhol, Vasarely, Anuszkiewicz, and many others. Through his creations, Dobeš transcended the borders of former Czechoslovakia and became a respected figure within the global avant-garde movement.

The path to becoming an internationally recognized artist was not easy for the native of Přerov (Czechia), who spent most of his ninety-five years life in Slovakia. While studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, Slovakia (1951–1956), he faced challenges due to his "capitalist background" and was only able to continue his studies with the support of Professor Ján Mudroch. A pivotal moment and turning point in his career came with his three-month stay in France, which he was able to undertake by means of a sham marriage application. During this time, he came into contact with modern art while earning a living by painting street scenes.

Milan Dobeš 

Optical Relief – Triptych, 1964

Vertical Lights, h 67 x w 51 cm

© Závodný Gallery

Milan Dobeš 

Optical Relief, Untitled, 1964

Metal, mixed media. H 55,5 x W 43,5 cm

© Závodný Gallery

Milan Dobeš  

Pulsing Rhythm, 1965 

Glass, metal, electric motor, 61 x 77 x 297 cm

© Svetlik Art Foundation

Milan Dobeš 

Movement of Light in Space IV, 1968

Metal, electric motor, bulb, 78x 40x195 cm

© Svetlik Art Foundation

MILAN DOBES: FROM WENCESLAS SQUARE TO INTERNATIONAL FAME

In 1966, he received an invitation to exhibit at the House of Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship in Prague, a bastion of socialist realism, which paradoxically became his breakthrough into the world of art. The exhibition of light and kinetic objects in the attractive space at Wenceslas Square, originally planned as a "protest action," attracted 56,000 visitors. It also caught the attention of prominent international theorists, including Frank Popper and Udo Kultermann, who recognized Dobeš as a key figure in kinetic art and op art. Frank Popper subsequently invited Dobeš to the Kunst–Licht–Kunst exhibition in Eindhoven, the first post-war exhibition of its kind in the world.

After that, Dobeš's works travelled to prestigious world exhibitions – Documenta 4 in Kassel (1968), EXPO '70 in Osaka, and the Biennale in Montevideo in 1969, where he received the First Prize for kinetic sculpture. Alongside Victor Vasarely, Andy Warhol, Edward Kienholz, and Martial Rayss, he was invited to Helsinki for the Ars 69 exhibition, which showcased sixty of the best contemporary artists from around the world. “I don't know how I got there, but I was there,” Milan Dobeš recalled nearly half a century later for a documentary film by the Olomouc Museum of Art. “And you know, it didn't strike me at the time at all. I thought I belonged there. In retrospect, I admire myself for I got there,” Milan Dobeš laughs as he reflects on those memories. His position among the key figures of global constructivism was affirmed in 2013 by his participation in the prestigious exhibition “Dynamo. A Century of Light and Movement in Art 1913-2013” at the Grand Palais in Paris, which recapped a century of kinetic art. From former Czechoslovakia, only František Kupka and Milan Dobeš were selected for this exhibition.

One of the highlights of Dobeš's career was his collaboration in 1971 with the American Wind Symphony Orchestra in the USA, where he contributed to the creation of a monumental light-kinetic object synchronized with the music of prominent composers such as Krzysztof Penderecki and Toshiro Mayuzumi.

Milan Dobeš 

Movement of Structure V, 1986

© Olomouc Museum of Art

Milan Dobeš  

Untitled, 1991

© Olomouc Museum of Art

Milan Dobeš 

The Great Rotation I, 1992

© Olomouc Museum of Art

MILAN DOBES: LIGHT, MOVEMENT, AND RHYTHM – A UNIQUE AESTHETIC

Milan Dobeš is like an equilibrist working with light and movement, he is the creator of precise op art graphics as well as extensive spatial kinetic objects. He is a refined illusionist and a colourful minimalist, whose rational approach results in works that astonishingly evoke emotional responses. Through his creations, he transforms the reality of space, drawing the viewers in with pulsating works that transport them to other worlds.

Among approximately 180 works, eighteen are by other significant global figures of constructivism and kineticism, allowing viewers to compare Dobeš's work with leading representatives in this field of visual art. “This is a unique opportunity to discover the work of an artist whose creations continue to resonate with both experts and the general public,” says curator Gina Renotière. “The exhibition was made possible due to the welcoming approach to loans from not only major state galleries but also private institutions and collectors,” explains Gina Renotière, noting that the exhibition will also feature objects and graphics from Dobeš's generous donation to the collection of the Olomouc Museum of Art.

Curators: Gina Renotière, Ivan Jančár

OLOMOUC MUSEUM OF ART

MUZEUM UMĚNÍ OLOMOUC

Denisova 47, 771 11, Olomouc 

www.muo.cz

Bela Kolarova Retrospective, Raven Row, London, 2013

Běla Kolářová
Raven Row, London
31 January - 7 April 2013

Raven Row, London, presents the first posthumous retrospective of the work of Czech artist Běla Kolářová (1923-2010). The show is both the first solo exhibition of the artist in the UK and the first major survey of her work outside the Czech Republic.

BELA KOLAROVA 

Alphabet of Things, 1964

Silver bromide photograph

13.8 x 18.8 cm

Courtesy of the Estate of Běla Kolářová

From her trademark ‘artificial negatives’, ‘pure light drawings’ and ‘derealised portraits’ to her assemblages and collages, Běla Kolářová pioneered an art based on intimate objects often associated with domesticity and the feminine. The works on display will span Kolářová’s career to include documentary photographs from the late fifties, camera-less experiments, ‘arranged’ photographs of objects and hair and assemblages from the sixties, as well as make-up drawings and assemblages from the seventies and eighties.

While rooted in the context of the Cold War and exile, Běla Kolářová’s practice is also closely linked to the life of her husband, the influential artist and poet Jiří Kolář, whose work overshadowed her own until its recent rediscovery. Despite the difficulties of exhibiting in her own country, she was able to develop a unique body of work, both formally and conceptually. As this exhibition will demonstrate, its legacy to the history of art – on both sides of the Iron Curtain – is anything but modest, unlike its materials and its author’s personality.

An accompanying catalogue published by Raven Row will include new essays by Prague-based writer and curator Karel Císař and Matthew S Witkovsky, Chair and Curator of the Department of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as an edited conversation between Alice Motard and Czech art historian Marie Klimešová, who organised the most complete exhibition of the artist’s work to date at Olomouc Museum of Art in the Czech Republic in 2006.

The exhibition is curated by Marie Klimešová and Alice Motard.

BELA KOLAROVA (born 1923, Terezín, former Czechoslovakia, died 2010, Prague). In 1980, during the era of ‘Normalisation’, Běla Kolářová and her husband Jiří Kolář left Czechoslovakia and lived in Paris before moving back to Prague in 1999. Kolářová’s work can be found in a number of private and public collections, among which the National Gallery and the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, the Moravian Gallery in Brno, the Olomouc Museum of Art, and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris. Since it was shown at documenta 12 in Kassel in 2007, her work has been included in group exhibitions in Vienna, Paris, London, Schwaz (Austria) and Cologne.

RAVEN ROW
56 Artillery Lane
London E1 7LS
Gallery's website: www.ravenrow.org

Czech Photography – MoCP Chicago - Anne and Jacques Baruch Collection Exhibition

The Anne and Jacques Baruch Collection of Czech Photography: Recent Acquisitions
Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago
January 29 - March 28, 2010

 JAROSLAV ROSSLER, Untitled, 1927

Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago

Gift of The Baruch Foundation

In conjunction with the Contemporary Czech Photography exhibition (previous post), the Museum of Contemporary Photography highlight works from the Baruch Collection which were gifted to the museum in 2009.  The exhibition includes works by Vaclav Chochola, František Drtikol, Josef Ehm, Jaromir Funke, Emila Medkova, Jaroslav Rössler, Jan Saudek, Adolf Schneeberger, and Josef Sudek.

The Czech Republic has an incredibly rich photographic tradition. At the turn of the 20th century, professional photographers such as František Drtikol and Josef Sudek joined their European counterparts in exploring experimental techniques to achieve artistic goals, in a movement that came to be known as Pictorialism. In the 1920s and 30s, a group of artists including Jaroslav Rössler and Jaromir Funke began creating highly experimental works influenced by French Surrealism and Russian Constructivism. Often combining elements of montage and abstraction, these avant garde masters became influential worldwide. After World War II, as artists were forced to grapple with pressures from the government, experimentation continued and imaginative and surreal photography grew strong underground and were used to subtly counter political ideology.  Simultaneously, the social documentary tradition thrived, exemplified in the work of Viktor Kolář and Jindrich Streit, who documented the often trying social circumstances. The Baruchs promoted, sold, and collected it all. 

Anne and Jacques Baruch began collecting work by Czech artists in 1968 during a visit to Prague and ended up becoming a window and a voice for the artists following Soviet occupation beginning the same year. Since many of the artists the Baruchs wanted to work with were not sanctioned by the authorities, Anne began smuggling art out of the country, often at great risk to everyone involved. Although government agents would seal her packages of officially sanctioned art before her departure, she would often alter or remake the seals with the help of artists in order to add more to her packages. She always traveled to Prague with a bright red Hartman suitcase equipped with a false bottom. On the way there she would fill it with art supplies that the artists could not buy, and on the return it would have artworks hidden inside. Once she was questioned by the FBI at her gallery, and once she was detained at the Prague airport and questioned at length. She even came up with a code that she used to correspond with artists and take notes about pricing and exhibition details. Through her travels Anne amassed a remarkable collection of both historical and contemporary Czech photography.

MoCP – Museum of Contemporary Photography

Columbia College Chicago, Chicago IL 60605

www.mocp.org

Dreams and Disillusion: Karel Teige and the Czech Avant-Garde at the Grey Art Gallery, NYU

Dreams and Disillusion

Karel Teige and the Czech Avant-Garde

Grey Art Gallery, NYU, New York

May 1 - July 7, 2001

Dreams and Disillusion provides a long-overdue exploration of the career of the most important Czech proponent of modernism, KAREL TEIGE.  Previously overlooked in Western accounts of the European avant-garde, Karel Teige (1900–1951) was a graphic designer and architectural theorist whose innovations in book design, poetry, stage sets, and collage revolutionized Czech artistic production in the 1920s and '30s. The exhibition both reveals the major contributions of Karel Teige and his circle to the development of modernism and illuminates the social and political forces that affected Czechoslovakia from the end of the First World War to the Soviet occupation. It features some 100 objects, including 21 of Teige's surrealist collages— never before been seen in the United States—as well as a full-scale model of Teige's ideal apartment for workers. This exhibition is organized by The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida.

"We are very pleased that the Grey Art Gallery will be able to participate in the tour of Dreams and Disillusion: Karel Teige and the Czech Avant-Garde," observes Lynn Gumpert, director of the Grey Art Gallery. "Teige's multi-faceted accomplishments certainly deserve a wider audience. The broad range of media explored by the artist, along with the important social issues he raises, are still extremely relevant today."

Drawn primarily from the superb collection of Central European graphic arts of The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Dreams and Disillusion focuses on Teige's key artistic production between the wars. Faced with the challenges of defining a newly independent Czech culture after the end of the First World War, Teige brought international attention to the Czech avant-garde through his connections to well-known Constructivists, Purists, Dadaists, Surrealists, and Bauhaus designers in Russia, France, and Germany. Karel Teige, who was eighteen years old when the Republic of Czechoslovakia gained its independence from Austria-Hungary, served as a conduit of ideas between East and West in the early days of the Soviet government.

One of the founders of Devetsil, a leading association of young artists and intellectuals in Prague, Karel Teige edited a number of significant avant-garde journals on art and architecture, and wrote books and essays on art, architecture, typography, photography, film, and theater. He also acted in his own plays, designed stage sets, and taught at the Bauhaus. Putting theory into practice, he produced poems, paintings, prints, book illustrations, film scripts, and photomontages. His embrace of technology and the cutting edge of modernist design techniques is evident throughout this remarkable body of work.

During the Great Depression in the 1930s, Karel Teige remained confident in the potential of socialism to improve conditions for the masses. He sought solutions to the economic and political crisis through architecture, offering theoretical housing projects that rejected the bourgeois way of life and addressed the needs of a newly empowered working class. However, the rise of Stalin, the Nazi invasion, the Second World War, and finally the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia shattered Teige's dreams of utopia. From the late 1930s until his untimely death in 1951, he turned inward, creating a series of edgy, erotic, and disturbing Surrealist collages.

The installation consists of five sections. The introductory section examines the rise of oppositional culture in Prague through photos, objects, and text, and introduces visitors to Teige's role in the Czech avant-garde. The second explores his early work and Devetsil; the third relates to poetism, the movement he founded with poet Vítezslav Nezval; the fourth illuminates his significant influence on modernist architecture. The exhibition concludes with the final phase of Teige's life, from Hitler's closing of the Bauhaus in 1933 to the artist's death in 1951. This section includes his surrealist collages, shown for the first time in the United States, from the Museum of Czech Literature in Prague.

The exhibition was organized by Dr. Eric Dluhosch, Professor Emeritus of Architecture at MIT; Wendy Kaplan, former Associate Director for Exhibitions and Curatorial Affairs at The Wolfsonian–Florida International University; and James Wechsler, former Assistant Curator at the Wolfsonian. The exhibition will be touring next fall to the Smart Gallery of Art at the University of Chicago, where it will be shown from October 4 to December 9, 2001.

The exhibition is accompanied by the publication Karel Teige, 1900–1951: L'Enfant Terrible of the Czech Modernist Avant-Garde (MIT Press, 1999), edited by Dr. Eric Dluhosch and Rostislav Svachá of the Czech Academy of Science.

GREY ART GALLERY, NYU

New York University

100 Washington Square East, New York, NY 10003

www.nyu.edu/greyart