Jaroslav Róna
A probe into contemporary Czech sculpture
Sixteen female and male sculptors meet at one exhibition, divided into two locations – the outdoor part is located in one of the two main streets of the Prague Market area and the other, indoor, in Hall 14 Trafo Gallery. The selection of authors and their works tells about the current state of Czech sculpture, some of its forms and personal positions within spatial expression. The impetus for the creation of the exhibition was not only an effort to draw attention to the exceptionally strong wave of young sculptors and their work, which is becoming more and more evident, but also to indicate the mutual context and intergenerational connections. And then one more thing – try to at least slightly readjust the zoom on the Czech art scene, when attention is focused almost exclusively on painting, or intermedial projects, for a long time.
"The exhibition presents individual author's processes, inspirations, morphology, material essence or subject matter, but even so it is possible to find certain moments that can be clearly perceived as dominant or even almost as a universal principle," says Radek Wohlmuth, curator of the exhibition.
One of them is the figure, the human figure, which often remains, much more than in other areas of fine art, the primary and defining lens, language and standard of values. The figuration itself represents the world clearly related to man. Through man, sculpture expands its territory not only to the external world, but also to the internal world – emotions, psychological states, social issues or issues of identity. The body functions much more as an open symbol – as a platform through which objective reality can be defined.
Another regularly recurring factor is objectivity and, together with it, the principles of fragmentation and composition, which are reflected in the methods of sculptural expression. If figuration already by its very nature includes an element of a certain non-definitive liveliness, for a moment of a captured moment and with it an expected transformation, the subject morphology often works on the contrary with stability and material objectivity in the sense of mediated testimony, or material metaphor, devoid of hand-made modeling in the traditional sense of the word adding matter.
A graphic publication by Ondřej Šorm was published for the exhibition, which contains a brief selection of the works of all the exhibited authors together with an accompanying text by the curator Radek Wohlmuth.
"We've been locked at home for two months, so we all need mental cleansing and encouragement, to see inspiration, to see beauty. After all, looking at beautiful visual art has, among other things, a therapeutic effect. And last but not least, we want private galleries to survive," states Jan Blaško from the Canadian Medical company, which makes the exhibition accessible to all visitors free of charge.
