City Gallery Prague, Municipal Library Exhibition Space, Oct 22, 2008 – Feb 02, 2009
The exhibition focuses on an often neglected phenomenon of ‘classical’ academic painting in the twentieth century, which was surviving in the shade of all the ‘modern -isms’. Despised by art historians and ‘modern’ artists as shallow, meaningless and empty, yet still supported by a broad loyal audience of middle class citizens, academic painting lived a life on its own.
The exhibition is divided into sections by the painting’s motives: Academic nude, lasciviousness, exotic, allegory/mythology, allegory/death, sentiment, portraiture, self-representation, political representation, public allegory and kitsch. In each part a flock of paintings are arranged as they were in the galleries in the beginning of the last century: One next to the other, stacked in both horizontal and vertical directions, so that the whole wall is covered. This is a quite different view than the gallery of today with paintings placed at eye-level, separated by discreet white spaces of empty wall. Sometimes there is a short video-loop of archival film footage in the center of the paintings grouped together. I think the effect works exactly according to the curator’s intent. You get a ‘picture’ of the whole with one glimpse. If anything catches your attention, you can go onto the next level and examine each painting individually. The closer-look level is supported by an exhibition guide. This features all the accompanying texts (which are very well funded and useful for understanding the exhibition) and a list of all the paintings featured in the exhibition. This is necessary, as individual paintings are not labeled with the author’s names (this would be quite difficult as all the artworks are in close distance, often all the way up to the ceiling). Individual paintings are only labeled with numbers, and if a paining draws your attention, you can use the number to find the information in the exhibition guide. I like this system, as it encourages the original mode of viewing these paintings were intended to. Instead of a modern-ist praise of individuality of the artist, the image itself is on the forefront. The image in relation to surrounding images. The images which originally told a mythological story to the viewer can be witnessed as they are being emptied of their layers of meaning and turned into a flattened version of reality, as a photographic image is. The nudes featured in stories referring to Greek goddesses slowly morph into 1:1 copies of pin-up girl photographs. The movie loop (sometimes a projection of still photograph slide) clearly states the influence which these ‘new media’ had on the tradition of academic painting.
I guess there are different readings of the trends and influences across media. But with this exhibition I appreciate the curator’s clear standpoint. Actually more than that, I consider the exhibition as a whole as the most complete artwork on display. Out of individual parts, each with its own history and influences, the exhibition manages to create a new unit which is more than a sum of its parts. It encourages the visitors to ‘read’ the paintings in a context, to compare and make conclusions. It is not a ‘neutral’ exhibition. And someone might object that the paintings are ‘forced’ into situations they don’t belong to. Yet a clear and meaningful standpoint of the author (curator) is the achievement and not a flaw of this exhibition.
Gustav Sykora – Broody Nude with Roses