In this online series, we present selected works from the collections of GASK’s permanent exhibition in which you will learn interesting facts about the various artists and the selected works.

JIŘÍ ANDERLE, PRINCE WILLIAM OF SCHAUMBURG-LIPPE, DECORATED

We present a work from our collections by the painter, printmaker, and illustrator Jiří Anderle. Prince William of Schaumburg-Lippe, Decorated was made in 1980.

Anderle emerged onto the Czech art scene in the mid-1960s as part of the country’s return to figuration. He is known primarily for his graphic works, in which he developed his own inimitable artistic vocabulary based on the masterly combination of various printmaking techniques. His extensive and diverse body of work spanning more than fifty years includes prints, drawings, paintings, and sculptures. Despite its great diversity of forms and techniques, the common denominator of Anderle’s art is the critical humanist viewpoint by which he explores specific historical events as well as universal human subjects. His art reflects the world through dramatic transformations in which the human figure becomes a metaphorical embodiment of inner essence.

In 1980, Anderle began working on his cycle titled Illusion and Reality, in which he explored the subject of humankind’s descent into the trap of self-destruction. This cycle consists of probably the most caustic examples of the grotesque found in his work. It was inspired by the 1962 photograph Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, which Anderle saw at a  Paris exhibition by the American photographer Diane Arbus in 1979. The shocking contrast between childhood and a deadly weapon (albeit a toy copy), combined with the unsettling expression on the boy’s face, made a lasting impression on Anderle. In his imagination, childhood memories of veterans of the Czechoslovak legions were joined with reflections on the horrors of war, and so he began to use photography as an openly admitted foundation for his paintings. Using black-and-white period photographs, Anderle portrayed the monumental unraveling of the human story; he often symbolically undressed his figures (in what he called “a mental and de facto striptease”) in order to erase differences in rank or status in the face of each figure’s unrelenting fate. He broke through the outer symbols of wordly power to reveal the soul inside. He placed his figures into dimensions in which their physical appearance was defined by what was inside or what they were experiencing – brutality, pomposity, the horror of a tragic death. In view of the genuine impact of these grotesque portraits, it becomes clear that, paradoxically, photography is an illusion and Anderle’s dimension reality.

It is worth noting that the historical figure in the original photograph for this painting is closely tied to modern Czech history. In 1860, Prince Wilhelm zu Schaumburg-Lippe (William of Schaumburg-Lippe, 1834–1906) inherited his father’s eastern Bohemian estates in Náchod and Ratibořice, where he subsequently promoted agricultural and industrial development. In 1866, he saw action in the Austro-Prussian War, after which he became a patron of the arts and sciences. He may well have been glad to see himself symbolically represented in our gallery’s permanent exhibition.

JAKUB ŠVÉDA, Biospace I

The work of multimedia artist Jakub Švéda, a graduate of Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts (where he studied painting under Jiří Sopko and visual communications under Jiří David), can be generally described as examining the state of our civilisation and its current endangerment. Švéda works with encoded symbols of our civilisation, references to the worlds of industry and computers, but he also depicts nature and the cosmos. He looks at the human landscape and the environment in which we live within the context of the clash between nature and technology, reason and emotion, the known world and the conquered world. This ambivalence is a source of powerful existential tension in Švéda’s works, which balances between gentleness and brutality, beauty and ugliness, order and chaos, and joy from life and the fear of its demise.

The drawing Biospace I is part of one of several series created after 2000 in which Švéda further develops the themes from his paintings and installations and which represent a more subtle position of Švéda’s multimedia work. Working with soft lines, he records traces of cosmic energy reflecting the micro- and macrocosm. Natural phenomena are mixed with records of human DNA; man thus becomes one with the universe through a series of lines.

This sense of urgency and call to action is even more strongly felt in his more recent works, which possess an even greater sense of intuitive danger and existential threat. In these works, Švéda creates a record of a struggle that could easily lead to the destruction of nature and civilisation. He depicts the threats to our world that we ourselves contribute to and asks the following questions: Could we ever lose our dominant position? Is this loss of dominance directly associated with the decline of humankind? A set of these works was exhibited at GASK in 2017 as part of an exhibition aptly titled Technovirus. Last year, Švéda’s installation Controller (2003, digital print on plastic board, Acrylon-V, metal, stainless steel, light), which breaks through the barrier between art and society, was included in the gallery’s permanent exhibition States of Mind / Beyond the Image. All these works are almost visionary in their prediction of the dangers to which nature is responding to today – reminding us through its responses that it is a force to be reckoned with.

ALEŠ OGOUN, Hope Awakened

Aleš Ogoun belongs to that generation of young painters who significantly influenced Czech art after the mid-1980s. But despite his important contribution to shaping and guiding the emerging, soon fully free cultural scene, Ogoun never sought a leading role among his peers. Since the 1990s, he has profiled himself as a “quietly inimitable” representatives of contemporary painting and as an experienced teacher in this “classical” field of art. In his paintings, Ogoun has repeatedly set out on exploratory journeys in areas ranging from material reality to the abstract realms of ideas and emotions characterized by non-objective forms and colours. His stylistic expression is characterised by an excited sensuality, sometimes with a touch of humour and irony.

Ogoun is a humanist through and through. That means that his re-composition of spatial levels and of the subsequent kinetic effects is a matter of dialogue with the viewer, whom he offers the chance to enter into the living subject of the image. In the end, we discover the essential fact that Ogoun guides us using a color, light, and perhaps even sound metaphor of the human touch, that primal way of learning about the world. The mention of “sound” is not by chance: Ogoun has a passionate relationship to music, and used to play the violin and piano (among other things in the band Krásné nové stroje), and musical motifs appear frequently in his work as a clearly legible or subtly intimated element of his polyphonic painting vocabulary.

Hope Awakenedrelates to the revolutionary year 1989, when democracy returned to Czechoslovakia after forty years of communism. In this piece, Ogoun makes distinctive use of his “lightpainting” technique, in which the viewer’s movement and the placement of the light source create a shimmering, reflective surface. Introducing this changing light into the painting symbolizes hope in dark times and contrasts sharply with the raw interpretation of feelings of hopelessness that nevertheless formed the seeds for a free society.

RICHARD KONVIČKA,Large Board

Since the 1980s, the iconographic foundation of the art of Richard Konvička has been an isolated figure – an allegory of the artist himself, who experiences emotionally and spiritually charged situations always with a newly mixed cocktail of danger, eroticism, irony, and an earnest sense of amazement at the phenomena of urban civilization, nature, and the cosmos.

Konvička’s mother was a textile designer, and he still keeps her old iron in his studio. Fascinated by its shape, heat, and movement, Konvička transformed the iron into a being capable of flying, of freely slipping through space and time. Another frequent element in his work, scissors, have a similar origin. In Konvička’s hands, scissors possess the figurative symbolism of waking eyes and marching feet, and also represent a sharp danger.

The painting Large Board was first exhibited in 2001 at Konvička’s solo exhibition at GASK’s predecessor, the Czech Museum of Fine Arts in Prague. One distinctive motif in the exhibited works was a human figure (or part thereof) confronted with what the artist called a “board” – a kind of vertical canvas that creates a distinct image plane within the painting. Konvička had been interested in the well-known concept of a “picture within a picture” even before this, but where he previously applied this principle only as a partial motif, this “inner plane” now formed the basis for the composition as a whole.

Konvička’s painting often contain the emblematic letter “R,” which can be interpreted as him including himself (through the first letter of his first name) into the fabric of the painting, but also an an express guarantee of his deep self-identification with the painting’s purpose and existence.

DANA SAHÁNKOVÁ, Untitled

Dana Sahánková’s monumental drawing reveals her inner world, thoughts and perceptions. It combines, in one single whole, her personal experience of reality, her unconscious mental state and her awareness of the cosmic order to produce a fascinating picture of the world in which details contrast with the whole of the universe.

The organically interconnected world of predators, dogs, cats, and their prey is filled with animality and the sense of tension that exists between fragility, vulnerability, animal force, and lurking danger. The scene plays out within an architectural construction that brings to mind the real world. The space of the universe is symbolized by the golden background, which – as in Gothic art – adds light to the painting, illuminating it from within.

LADISLAV ŠALOUN, Čas (Byl jsem včera a znám zítřek)

This unrealized gravestone by the founding father of Czech modern sculpture, Ladislav Šaloun, is a symbolic contemplation of the fate of human civilisation and the measuring of human time. The idea comes from ancient mythology, from Oedipus’ encounter with the Sphinx, when this mythical creature with the body of a lion and the head of a woman asks the king a fateful question about the meaning of human existence. The nude male figure was inspired by Rodin’s The Thinker, the central figure in his largest work, The Gates of Hell. The symbolic motif of the effect of fate on human endeavours is found throughout Šaloun’s work, as is the fateful subject of man and woman: their opposition and their attempt at coming together.

ALÉN DIVIŠ, From the cycle The Wedding Shirts

Thanks to the careful work of three generations of art historians, the distinctive art of the painter and outsider Alén KarelDiviš (1900–1956) continues to carve out a space in gallery exhibitions. Not only his best known works (his “prison cycle” made in the United States, in which he recalled his time at the La Santé prison in Paris), but also his postwar paintings, made after his return to Czechoslovakia, have earned much acclaim. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he produced an extensive set of illustrations for Karel Jaromír Erben’s Kytice (A Bouquet of Czech Folktales), initially planned as a fine press edition. The first story from Erben’s collection that Diviš illustrated was “The Wedding Shirts.” In fact, he had begun working on images for this ballad while still in exile in America in the first half of the 1940s. Work on these illustrations brought back memories of his own traumatic experiences from the Sidi el-Ayachi internment camp near Azemmour, Morocco. This extensive body of work, produced in sequences reminiscent of comic book art, exercised a strange attraction on the artist – he knew the book by heart from childhood and was fascinated by the mysterious atmosphere of the ancient storyline of a girl’s encounter with death. In addition, the ballad is set almost entirely at night, and Diviš was fundamentally attracted to darkness (he himself worked mostly at night). The constrast with the white skeletons moving about in the darkness represented another artistic challenge. Our image captures the height of the young protagonist’s anxiety, contained in the verse – ‘Alas! alas! poor maiden mine / The dead are here, for the third time’ – as the skeletons surround the charnel house in which the unfortunate girl has locked herself with the dead corpse.