PETR DUB / A SURVIVOR’S DIARY

The first of two overview exhibitions assesses the collecting activities of the Fait Gallery, initiated by Igor Fait and systematically developed since 2012 in synergy with the chief curator Denisa Kujelová, who worked in the gallery until mid-2025.

Given the extensive nature of the collection which comprises over 1,000 items, and considering the multiple artistic approaches and the time span covered by the collection, which ranges from the pre-war avant-garde to contemporary art, it appeared natural to organise two consecutive shows.

In order to maintain a certain homogeneity in the exhibition, it was necessary to find a simple and universal key for selecting the artists and individual works. In most cases, this took the form of an abstract geometric-constructivist tendency which, with a few exceptions, involved pure minimalism, while in other cases it was softer abstraction with connotations of a reality-inspired starting point.

Part of the exhibition is devoted to the presentation of pre-war modernism, making up the core of the collection from the very beginning. It is the cubist tendency, evident in the works of Emil Filla and the more frequently represented Antonín Procházka, that forms a link with the mentioned geometric-abstract tendency which in many cases takes on a mathematical character in the works of artists active in the second half of the 20th century.

In connection with cubism, it is also necessary to mention that the exhibition includes several works related more to contemporary art which can be described as explicitly figurative, mediating a kind of neo-cubism and thus making an exception from the rule within the exhibition concept.

A confrontational aspect is supplied by the younger generation of artists fluidly incorporated into the exhibition. They function as a subtle refreshing and at the same time convey the message that the recycling of basic forms defined in the first half of the 20th century is still relevant, even though the artists' starting points are now quite different.

From the media perspective, the exhibition provides an overview of the segment of the collection that exclusively addresses traditional art forms such as painting, drawing, graphic art, objects, sculpture, assemblage, and various types of collage.

The overall aim of the exhibition is to present the part of the collection relating to the mentioned trends, to define and demonstrate formal and content-unifying elements among artists across the given time scope, and to set them in a mutual context.

Ondřej Kotrč

PETR DUB / A SURVIVOR’S DIARY

24.01.2015 - 19.03.2015

Fait Gallery MEM
Božetěchova Street 1 (entrance from Metodějova Street), Brno
24/1 – 19/3/2015
Opening: 22/1/2015 at 7pm
Curator: Ondřej Chrobák

Petr Dub is a (post) conceptual artist. He systematically examines the medium of hanging painting, or rather the current position of painting. Dub's paintings are indeed indisputable results of manual, and let us add, often very challenging and sophisticated activity, yet the used verb "examine" is not a meaningless synonym for "painting" in his artistic practice. It primarily refers to the conscious mental activity that precedes the actual process of painting. Petr Dub is also the author of one of the few, if not the only Czech written theoretical study, which reflects the local post-conceptual painting in the context of the current discourse of art. The book, published under the title Selected Post-conceptual Approaches in the Contemporary Czech Painting, was the output of his PhD. studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno. Studying in Petr Kvíčala and Milan Houser‘s studio in Brno as well as a one-year internship at the Prague Academy of Arts Architecture & Design of Jiří David and Milan Salák were not in Dub’s case only a formal fulfilling of duties. Petr Dub managed, in confrontation with outstanding, but artistically and humanly different personalities, distill for himself a personal lesson, which forms a compact foundation of his current artistic trajectory. In gastronomy, which was actually the artist's first career choice, it would be an analogy to the format of "fusion cuisine" combining the strong background of Brno conceptualism and the heritage of Prague postmodernism.

The title of the exhibition, A Survivor’s Diary, offers as one of the ways to read it, a commentary on the current situation. As the Survivor, for the reading subject is kept secret, we may appoint the Painting. The conceptual thinking and painting are in local stereotypes considered to be antagonistic directions. The defenders of paintings blame the conceptual approach not only for "incomprehensibility" of contemporary art, but also from the direct participation in the proclamation of the "end of painting", which was mainly understood as an attempt to destroy the competition. In 1997 in Prague's Rudolfinum Gallery there took place a program exhibition focused on the current situation of painting called The last painting. Post-apocalyptic jargon is, since than, a mandatory part of the rhetorical arsenal used to reflect the current status of painting. For Petr Dub, who exists on the tectonic breaking point of two irreconcilable worlds, similar references make flirtatious game. He winks to both sides, but he has already decided to remain single. He acts similarly in his artistic practice. He does not leave the field of traditional hanging painting on purpose. At the same time, however, he applies the strategies that in the history of at least the last fifty years, gradually led to its questioning and rejection. Sci-fi literature works with the possibility of time travel, the intervention in history could change, or rather reverse the present danger. Petr Dub does not seek a revision of history. He knows too much for that. It seems that he rather tries to use the potential that remained fallow in the past on the altar of rapid, avantgarde method. Hybrid status, when an art work contains also the genetic code of its own end and (re) birth represents for us, the survivors, one of the relevant reasons to continue to seriously deal with art.

Ondřej Chrobák

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