WHAT'S ON BRITSKÉ LISTY

Out to the World: Pavla Kačírková, Rudolf Samohejl, Katka Venclíková, Lukáš Rais, Kryštof Hošek

18. 8. 2010 / Jan Paul

Pasáž U Hájků will open a new exhibition this August 19th, dedicated to the sculpture students from the Prague Art Faculties VŠUP and AVU. The attitude of the young generation towards our present art is very liberal, it profits at the same time from tradition as well as from the current trend of art taking the role of critical social commentator. Katka Venclíková, Lukáš Rais, Ruda Samohejl (all from Prague`s VŠUP sculpture course), and Kryštof Hošek (from Prague's AVU) will expose mostly from modeled plastic, which is nowadays a neglected field.

Kryštof Hošek (1984), who is the one among them who is closes to the traditional concept of sculpture, will expose his piece called Eva, the Biblical first woman, brought to the present days. His Eva is not at all naive and inexperienced, on her high heels patiently tolerating around her corpulent body a lascivious spinning snake, lying her head down with an eager erotic randiness towards her whispering temptor. Hošek expressed, with is sculpture of Eva, the labile consumerism of our Era, where one lives and enjoys as much as one wants, without considering the consequences.

In a way, also similar to the sculpture Zdání, from Katka Venclíková (1981). That's a female torso towards which a man, just like Hošek's snake, bows towards the woman's neck, although in this case we can't say with certainty whether she is accepting or not the erotic gesture. Katka created a symbolic picture of the tension between two dominant personalities, expressing the uncertainties of the modern day relationship between men and women. A seemingly lyrical scene may hide a brutal game, in which we don`t know who is the victim and who is the assailant.

On the other hand, Diskobolos by Lukáš Rais (1975) is the portrait of a concrete and real person, someone imprisoned inside his handicapped body, but regardless of that is happily high-spirited, just as everybody knows him. The metaphor in that piece is obvious, the handicapped guy portrayed definitely won't get the disk he has on his hands to fly much far, but still, with this he puts a mirror in front of all happily healthy people who are not eternally satisfied.

Diskobolos is rather an exception in Lukáš Rais` style -- he mostly creates large welded structures made from already existing standardized prefabricated industrial stuff.

A current symbolic hidden meaning can also be found on the sculpture Lenka from Rudolfa Samohejla ( 1987 ), which also portrays a real person. The author tries to express the internal world of a girl, even with her attitude towards society. Her extremely curbing arms symbolize defiance, the refusal of the values and pressures from our current world, as a metaphor for the attempt to fight for and save the human nature and integrity. That thought highlights even the central composition that evokes a cross as a theme of human balance and harmony in today's unstable world. Art has always been the mirror of their times, so it is valuable that young beginner sculptress understand our existence from within that context.

While that part of the exhibition, which happens in the lower floor of the gallery, is made of representations of pieces produced mainly indoors, the one from the upper floor of has Pavla Kačírková ( 1985, from Brno's FAVU school) exposing huge pictures documenting her piece Křížové cesty, done outside in the town Šarov na Zlínsku (2008), and her ongoing project called Chapels (Kaple - Objekty do krajiny), based on the Way of the Cross.

She feels the need to create new art with a common valid mission -- in both projects she deals with sacred themes and spiritual issues, expressed in easy, but still functional means. She thinks up her projects with an architectonic mind, that way surpassing the sculpture field, because she feels the abstract substances of her iron chapels or crosses made from concrete in the countryside more like buildings than art pieces. In her effort it is worthy that she conforms the idea and intention to a form that has a concrete content. She needs, for example, just a couple of metal sheets 6 meters high and that react to the force of the winds. Unconventional materials, monumentality and easy comprehension are the main characteristics of her work. The movement of the vertical line up means not only an imaginary road to God, the connection between Heaven and Earth, but also encourages the possibility of spiritual rest. The internal part of the cross made from concrete creates a cavity in which a person can stand up, that way allowing for experiencing a bit of what Christ suffered. One doesn't need to just stand in front of the cross, but actually become part of it. He work isn't only motivated by her personal faith and, to a certain extent, to escape from the oppressive existence offered by today's uncertain world, but by an attempt to offer people a place to run into, during their trekking around the countryside.

Vytisknout