A Krtek’s notes from Prague Pt. 2
The Krtek a.k.a mole returns to Prague, and sorry for the delay of this second part after a busy week in London. As already mentioned I made a studio visit to artist Jiri David, who is a professor at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design. He came there after having left the Academy of Fine Arts, where he had a major fall-out with Milan Knizak, who still holds a professorship there, having been its director earlier on, while he is still – seemingly despised as such by many in the Prague art scene – head of the National Gallery (a museum conglomerate encompassing eight major sites in Prague), which under Knizak’s reign has become a place alleged with cronyism, corruption, and a fundamental failure to maintain – at least in regard to modern and contemporary art – a proper exhibition programme that reflects the status, budget and potentials of the place. It’s hard for me to verify all of these allegations, but it seems undisputed that it’s not least Knizak’s personal friendship with Czech president Vaclav Klaus that has kept him in power, paired with his booming, egomaniac personality, and his credentials as a once important artist. And it can be taken for a fact that the one temporary exhibition on at the National Gallery’s main building, the Veletrnzi Palace – a fantastic modernist building by Oldrich Tyl and Josef Fuchs built in the late 1920s – showed sweet signs of cronyism, corruption and artistic irrelevance: it was a show entitled ‘Thailand through the Eyes of Czech Painters Martina Chloupa and Jan Stoss’, and as the press release happily stated in the first paragraph, the works on show where ‘inspired by the artists’ impressions from their tour of Thailand in March 2008, organized by the Embassy of the Kingdom of Thailand in Prague, in partnership with Thai Airways International and the Tourism Authority of Thailand.’ Blimey, that’s quite audacious given that the artists, both of whom – what a coincidence! – are graduates from Milan Knizak’s class at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, were sent on a first-class trip to temples and tourist sites resulting in pretty pictures now on display right at the moment when the country they travelled to goes through its biggest political crisis in a long time. Good timing!
But, as it happens often in conversations amongst Prague art people apparently, one could go one forever with lamenting the sorry state of the museums under Knizak (and in fact Jiri David has been one of his most outspoken opponents), but nevertheless, let’s return to David and his artistic practice. David’s studio – which also is practically his storage of his prolific practice since the 1980s – is chaotic, but systematically so; his painting oscillates between sometimes fragile and subtle, sometimes straightforward and blunt; he also does photography and conceptual work. In any case most striking on my studio visit where his works on large, un-primed canvas. He keeps them in rolls on the floor, not much caring for possible dents or folds, welcome alterations to their surface quality. They bear slight, fading traces of architectures or geometrical forms, while other elements are painted in minute detail; for example, on a painting depicting a fainting rendition of the famous image of Duchamp playing chess with the naked woman, there were matchsticks, obviously functioning as an allegory for conceptual ideas, each painted life-size, meticulously after individual burned matchsticks. Marek Pokorny, director of The Moravian Gallery in Brno, Czechia’s second largest art museum preparing a retrospective of David’s work, was also present at the studio and turned out to be an expert of David’s prolific work since the 1980s, able to date most works immediately.
The factory building that David’s studio is located in once belonged to the Koh-I-Noor company that produced zips, buttons, snaps etc. – just the kind that Bela Kolarova used to create her delicate neo-constructivist works from in the 1960s (shown at last year’s Documenta). The founder of Koh-I-Noor – named after the legendarily large diamond in the Queen of England’s crown – was Jindrich Waldes, an inventive man who later was persecuted by the Nazis and died under suspicious circumstance in 1941 after his family had paid 8 million Czech crowns to the Nazi authorities to free him, was also a passionate collector, and avid supporter of Frantisek Kupka (who also painted the company logo of a young woman holding the company’s trademark snap in her eye like a monocle). It was only in Prague, at the Kampa Museum, that I came to realize how important Kupka is, in my eyes – when it comes to the invention of the modern language of abstract painting – no less than the missing link between Kandinsky and Mondrian (Alfred H. Barr of MOMA initially was very aware of Kupka’s importance, but later lost interest). Kupka, unlike Kandinsky, was not so much interested in symbolic ciphers, and unlike Mondrian, he was not so much interested in the sheer purity of geometric abstraction. Rather, his work seems to explore precisely the void between the two: hybrid forms of abstractions that are constitutively restless. A case in point is his fantastic painting The Fair (Centredance) of 1912-13, that conjures the image of a chorus line (apart from the title) simply through its panorama format encompassing abstract vertical stripes, accompanied here by studies that with their toned colours and playful forms look very 1960s graphic design.
The Kupka Museum was founded with the collection of Jan and Meda Mládek (the late Jan Mládek, who left Prague in 1939 and studied in London under Lord Keynes, was one of the first governors of the International Monetary Fund, and Meda Mládek, who studied economics and art history, and published Czech exile literature in Paris in the 1950s, is today in her nineties, still supporting the museum); it also has a good selection of works by Czech abstractionists from later periods, including the soft, sensual abstractions of Karel Malich (born 1924) and the computer-generated images of Zdenek Sykora ( born 1920; Sykora already used computers as early as 1964), both of whom are artists that the private gallery Zdenek Sklenar made substantial exhibitions with and about. Zdenek Sklenar is an enthusiastic supporter of Czech and Slovakian abstraction, which now has become a major stake in the local art market – while it still largely waits to be discovered in the West. Milan Grygar (born 1926) is another interesting figure that Sklenar works with, an artist who for most of his life has explore the connection between drawing and sound, tapping into territory where he would also cross paths with John Cage. More recently Sklenar has started to work with Jiri Kovanda, who did a show there in Spring that included a golden ring put on display behind a wall without any surveillance whatsoever (almost surprisingly, it was not stolen). On show when I was there was an exhibition of three Chinese artists; notably Huang Rui is someone worth exploring: he’s not so well known in the West, possibly because many of his works are text-based, but he was an influential figure in the Chinese scene very early on, and was a member of the 1979 Stars Group, which also included Ai Weiwei. In any case, this small exhibition proved much more rewarding than the preposterously pompous show in the gilded halls of the Rudolfinum, comprised of huge paintings by Zhang Xiaogang, Fang Lijun, and Feng Mengbo, realised, as the press release states unashamedly, with one commercial Hongkong gallery who happens to deal with works of all three of them.
I think I have to wrap this up, so just to mention that I saw a great show of abstract landscape paintings by the Japanese, Dusseldorf-trained painter Maki Na Kamura at Jiri Svestka Gallery, and some good works in a slightly confused show of South-American art at Futura Gallery. I really liked one work particularly, an oddly absurd video by Chilenian artist Ivan Navarro entitled I’m not from here, I’m not from there (2006) during the course of which a protagonist, I presume the artist, builds a wheel barrow that carries an aggregate that provides the electricity for neon tubes that line the barrow, the colours of which he continues to change all the time. All of that to the accompaniment of a melancholic song of the same title. No Soy De Aqui.
P.S.: many thank’s to Noemi Smolik for help and support in navigating Prague’s art scene.
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by Jörg Heiser
