Spring 2018 exhibitions

The National Gallery in Prague inaugurates its 222nd year of exhibition program with the Grand Opening which celebrates an uncompromising work of distinguished women artists. With her installation, WUNDERBILD, German artist Katharina Grosse turns the Gallery’s Grand Hall into a dreamy landscape of painterly corporeality while the retrospective of visionary work of Austrian artist Maria Lassnig—a pioneer of female emancipation in the world of art dominated by men—is an evidence of courage and resilience.

Katharina Grosse: WUNDERBILD
February 16, 2018–January 6, 2019, Trade Fair Palace

German artist, Katharina Grosse (born 1961) paints monumental tableaux of desire that can be perceived as a sublime act of lovers’ embrace towards the space, an architecture and the viewer. For the National Gallery in Prague, Grosse elaborates a large-scale, site specific painterly installation which radically redefines painting as a performative and architectural medium and responds to the Gallery’s industrial space of the late 1920s functionalist style. WUNDERBILD is an architectural painting, a spatial image which the viewer inhabits with his/her body and mind. The color gains a volume; the flat surface turns sculptural; the pictorial field crosses the limits of the visual. Epic in scale, immersive installation reminds of both a medieval mural and a womb-like cave of a pre-ancient drawing, a post-theatrical chamber of a hyper-technicized environment. For Grosse, the painting is an unconstrained act of freedom. Conceptually extravagant and breathtakingly grandiose WUNDERBILD is an outburst of pictorial generosity. Registering a gestural moment of image’s appearance, it perceives painting as a processual practice of an extreme resilience and flux, a life itself, a mental and physical preoccupation. Additionally, uncanny still life composed of naked trunks of dead trees, piled over one another in a quasi-catastrophic manner and flooded in industrial paint has been conceived on the threshold between the architecture and the natural environment. In both cases, the artist creates an autonomous space, defined by color and form, a post-romantic landscape of a subjectivity and nature in ruins.

Curator: Adam Budak

Maria Lassnig 1919–2014
February 16–June 17, 2018, Trade Fair Palace

The National Gallery in Prague is proud to present Maria Lassnig 1919-2014, the first in the Czech Republic large scale exhibition of the groundbreaking oeuvre of one of the most distinguished artists of the present day, Maria Lassnig (Austria, 1919-2014).

Featuring over 50 large-format paintings and numerous works on paper (drawings and watercolors), as well as sculptures and animation films that reveal Lassnig’s long standing exploration of the body and self-representation, the exhibition spans the artist’s entire, over seven-decades long, career; from the abstract works made during the 1940s in Vienna, through painterly experiments of the periods spent in Paris and New York, including cutting-edge cinematic work, down to the mature body of work after her return to Austria in 1980, featuring rarely exhibited sculptures, and concluding with the paintings, drawings and watercolors made in the final years of her life that focus on self-portraiture and investigate the idea behind much of Lassnig’s art, namely the notion of “body awareness,” concentrated on the introspective experiences and depiction of the invisible aspects of the inner sensations. Using herself as the subject of her paintings, Lassnig addresses the fragility of the body, the ageing process and the passing of time—a human condition perceived through a lens of a singular, corporeal and mental experience.

Maria Lassnig 1919–2014 is a modified version of the exhibition Maria Lassnig conceived by Tate Liverpool and curated by Kasia Redzisz and Lauren Barnes (May 18–September 18, 2016).

Curator: Adam Budak, in a collaboration with Kasia Redzisz

Moving Image Department #8:
Maria Lassnig, My Animation Is an Artform, featuring Lukáš Karbus
February 16–September 9, 2018, Trade Fair Palace

Coinciding with the retrospective of the prolific oeuvre of Maria Lassnig, this exhibition presents Lassnig as an experimental filmmaker. In the 1970s, film became a significant part of her artistic practice. Considered the grande dame of Austrian animation film, Lassnig studied animation at the New York School of Visual Arts during her stay in New York (1968-1980). As a member of the Women/Artist/Filmmakers, Inc., the feminist avant-garde group which she co-founded in 1974 together with Martha Edelheit, Doris Chase, Carolee Schneemann, Rosalind Schneider, Silvianna Goldsmith, Nancy Kendall, Susan Brockman, Alida Walsh and Olga Spiegel, Lassnig made a number of animated films between 1970 and 1976 that contain autobiographical elements, dealing with women’s role in society and the increasing intrusion of technology in our lives, in a playful way.

Additionally, the exhibition features a site-specific work by Czech artist, Lukáš Karbus (born 1981, Ceska Lipa). Developed in a response to the cinematic oeuvre of Maria Lassnig, Karbus’ monumental two-part watercolor painting combines the references to the modernist movements with more contemporary associations that recall animation techniques and trick films. The artist oscillates on the edge of abstraction, covering the vast sheets of paper with generous strokes of color in an almost psychedelic act of unlimited freedom.

Curator: Adam Budak

Poetry Passage #6: Radek Brousil, COOL WATER featuring Johan Grimonprez
February 16–September 9, 2018, Trade Fair Palace

Poetry Passage#6 considers the economies of words and the insufficiency of semantics while investigating the politics of representation and the grammar of affect. Czech artist, Radek Brousil (born 1980, lives in Prague) practices pictorial poetry of the unrepresentable and the invisible. Unveiling manipulation strategies, inherent within the technological apparatus of photographic medium, the artist points out the political and social implications of the image production which identify the agencies of power, contribute to the construction of otherness and consequently influence the viewer’s perception. In Poetry Passage #6 Brousil’s work is set in a dialogue with the politics of love as elaborated by Michael Hardt, political philosopher, who in the most recent video everyday words disappear by Belgian artist, Johan Grimonprez advocates a political system to be based on love, rather than on fear.

Curator: Adam Budak

Introducing Patricia Dauder: Surface
February 16–September 9, 2018, Trade Fair Palace

Conceived in situ, Surface is Patricia Dauder’s poetic elaboration of an image as a complex architecture, composed of layers of memory and meaning. The installation builds up a dialogue amongst several elements, carefully distributed in a space, which are commonly dark, flat, and that share a certain fragile appearance and a virtual lack of volume. Their spatial choreography enhances a conversation as they seem to face each other or to be connected by invisible lines. Patricia Dauder was born 1973, Spain and studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi (Barcelona). She lives and works in Barcelona.

Introduced by Adam Budak