KRAJINA + / LANDSCAPE +
GBR / The Benedikt Rejt Gallery in Louny
14.05.2021 - 25.07.2021
Curated by Lucie Šiklová, Radoslava Schmelzová, Dagmar Šubrtová
The Benedikt Rejt Gallery in Louny is registered in the professional public and among friends of art as an institution that has long been dealing mainly with geometric abstraction, based on the Russian avant-garde of the first third of the 20th century. The gallery's current strategy does not deny this starting point, but in the context of the present it aims to shift the significance of the avant-garde to the present day. The avant-garde as a vanguard or guard cannot remain petrified in history. To be avant-garde in today's sense of the word, we understand to be quiet, internalised, reoriented from the city and technology, for example to the landscape, nature, to one's own resources. This involves, for example, on the ground of GBR in this sense, a bit provocatively trying to put a paradoxical equation between avant-garde and regressive. We do not thus resign ourselves to the original focus of the gallery of contemporary art and the collection-creating institution. However, we are responsible to both legends and today's artists and the public. The aim is to present the collections, open the gallery outside, symbolically and literally stand out from the building into space, into the landscape through three thematic, intertwining exhibitions, under the auspices of the LANDSCAPE +.
The exhibition LANDSCAPE + (May 14 - July 25, 2021) will cross the borders of the gallery and reach the Bohemian Central Mountains with accompanying programs. The first part of the exhibition will present selected works of landscape painting from the GBR collections, which will be complemented by works by contemporary artists (Tomas Polcar | Mariana Alasseur | Dagmar Subrtova | Barbora Nemcova | Ales Ruzicka | Petr Gruber, Jiri Kubovy). GBR hides works in its collections that do not deserve to be hidden in the depositories. The most extensive partial exhibition of the LANDSCAPE + project thus includes selected thematic works from the gallery's collections, the authors of which are, surprisingly, artists from the 19th century to the present:
August Piepenhagen, Hugo Ullik, Alois Bilek, Antonin Slavicek, Emil Filla, Jindrich Prucha, Vaclav Spala, Josef Capek, Jindrich Styrsky, Karel Teige, Karel Cerny, Vaclav Rabas, Kamil Lhotak, Pravoslav Kotik, Olga Karlikova, Jiri John, Karel Malich , Bedrich Dlouhy, Cestmir Kafka, Milos Sejn, Frantisek Skala, the Louny trinity Zdenek Sykora, Vladislav Mirvald, Kamil Linhart and others. The second part concerns land art, specifically the presentation of photographs and the publication "Contemporary works of art in the landscape", supplemented by a thematic lecture by its authors - Dagmar Šubrtová and Radoslava Schmelzova. The third part of the LANDSCAPE + project is an exhibition of historical photographs with a separate opening (Jan Ambruz, Dalibor Chatrny, Epos 257, Vaclav Fiala, Lukas Gavlovsky, Miloslav Sonny Halas, Monika Imrova, Magdalena Jetelova, Pavla Kacirkova, Ivan Kafka, Kristof Kintera, Lenka Klodova, Jan Krticka, Martin Rajnis, Tomas Ruller, Jan Sepka, Jan Simek, Petr Stibral, Jan Trejbal, Jiri Valoch, Martin Zet). A unique discovery of photographic glass plates, it captures the surroundings of Louny and the town itself at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, at the time of the development of tourism. The exhibition is created in cooperation with the Regional Museum in Louny.
Milos Šejn: Talking water, the Javoří creek in the Giant mountains, August 29th 1991 / A layer of sound just on the edge of the rippling surface reveals the hidden water language of this particular place. Sound installation.
Milos Šejn: Solar Mountain, 2014, earthwork
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John K. Grande: ART SPACE ECOLOGY, 2019
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