This year’s edition of the international music festival Prague Spring will be complemented by an exhibition of works of art with an unusual assignment. The inspiration for their creation was the cycle of symphonic poems Má vlast by Bedřich Smetana.
Petr Nikl, Ivan Pinkava, Milan Grygar, Daniel Vlcek, Jakub Roztočić and Ira Svobodová. Six leading Czech artists representing various techniques, media and generations will contribute their works to the enrichment of the entire international music festival. The theme for their work was the cycle of symphonic poems by Bedřich Smetana, My Homeland, Which Is It Prague spring inaugurated every year on May 12. On that occasion, the opening of the exhibition with the title will also take place Prague Spring Art Salon.
The works will be exhibited at festival concerts in the Rudolfinum and the Municipal House. On Sunday, May 26, the unique art collection will be auctioned as part of KODL Gallery’s 91st Auction and at Artslimit.com, who are project partners. The proceeds of the charity auction will be donated to the Prague Spring Festival. “We believe that this creates a unique accompanying art program of our festival and will become an annual tradition,” Pavel Trojan, director of the Prague Spring, adds to the exhibition.
The exhibition was created in collaboration with two curators – Jan Kudrna and Milan Dospel. At the final concert Prague Spring in the Municipal House June 3rd will be the result of the auction was solemnly announced. The exceptional position of the Art Salon among the accompanying events of the Prague Spring is also confirmed by the independent graphic concept on the main festival visual, which was developed by the Dynamo Design studio.
On the occasion of the project, a short documentary was created in which the staff of Prague Spring visited the artists directly in their studios. You can watch it on the YouTube channel of Prague Spring.
Art Salon of the Prague Spring brings unique works of top artists. In the work Milan Grygar sound is a very important element. He has been working on his cycle since the mid-1990s Antiphons, and he just selected one painting from it for Art Salon. An antiphon is a musical form derived from a liturgical verse. It allows to express the relationship of two sound elements clashing in one space and time. The image that will be seen is also based on the essence of visual contrast and sound articulation. In this context, it is good to recall the Prague Spring concert in 2011, where Grygar’s graphic scores were performed.
Petr Nikl created a work titled My motherland and he applied ink and ink of six colors to the space of the image, which he divided into six segments. These were subsequently spread across the canvas by mechanized bugs and thus created the final form of the work.
Ivan Pinkava presents a photo My Fatherland, in which he reflects on his relationship to “My Homeland” as a symbol that he subjects to his own investigation. In the photograph, an unspoken story plays out, which hints at a personal relationship or a view of the essence of oneself, one’s homeland, and existence in general.
Jakub Roztočić in his image Well 78 for the first time, he works with a color spectrum of six default colors, which is the number of the symphonic poems of My Country. Using a self-constructed visualization generative brush in his work, he contains a painting – and at the same time an object and a sound recording – which transitions into an autonomous work.
Artist Ira Svobodová was inspired by her most popular poem from the mentioned cycle. Picture Sárkawhose main motif is a dynamically shaped pink ribbon, is based on the dynamics of the scores and the story of the poem, which, according to the author, is full of betrayal, love and tension.
Daniel Vlcek he is inextricably linked to the world of music in his work. In the past, he established himself as a prominent representative of the music and performance scene, now he is increasingly profiled as a painter and conceptual artist working with the visual capture of sound. For the Prague Spring he created a painting with the title Spherical Event IIIinspired by the motif From Bohemian meadows and groves.
The works will be exhibited at festival concerts in Rudolfinum and Municipal house. The opening hours of the exposition are planned for the time before the concerts according to the Prague Spring program.
Photo: © 2024 Prague Spring
