ANONYMOUS FORM OF SQUARE

JIŘÍ HILMAR

 
LOVE LIFE

JIŘÍ THÝN

 
THE SKY SERENE AS A VAST AQUARIUM

NÉPHÉLI BARBAS

 
unconductive trash

Largely Observed

 
Tomáš Hlavina

TLNVXYK Puzzle

 
Filip Dvořák

The Ravine – The Room

 
Jiří Staněk

Brightness

 
Petr Nikl

Wild Flowerbeds

 
Lukáš Jasanský - Martin Polák

Sir's Hunting Ground

 
Lenka Vítková

First book of emblems

 
Inge Kosková

Flow

 
David Možný

Blink of an Eye

 
Kristián Németh

Warm Greetings

 
Jiří Kovanda

Ten Minutes Earlier

 
Karel Adamus

Minimal Metaphors

 
Tomáš Absolon

RAFA MATA

 
František Skála

TWO YEARS' VACATION

 
Olga Karlíková

At Dawn

 
Pavla Sceranková & Dušan Zahoranský

Work on the Future

 
Selection from the Fait Gallery Collection

ECHO

 
Vladimír Kokolia

The Essential Kokolia

 
Alena Kotzmannová & Q:

The Last Footprint / Seconds Before…

 
Nika Kupyrova

No More Mr Nice Guy

 
Markéta Othová

1990–2018

 
Valentýna Janů

Salty Mascara

 
Jan Merta

Return

 
Radek Brousil & Peter Puklus

Stupid

 
Milan Grygar

LIGHT, SOUND, MOTION

 
Svätopluk Mikyta

Ornamentiana

 
Denisa Lehocká

Luno 550

 
Eva Rybářová

KURT HERMES

 
Christian Weidner a Lukas Kaufmann

ERASE/REWIND

 
Markéta Magidová

TERTIUM NON DATUR

 
Tomáš Bárta

EXTERNAL SETUP

 
Václav Stratil

LANDSCAPES

 
Ondřej Kotrč

TOO LATE FOR DARKNESS

 
Kateřina Vincourová

"WHENEVER YOU SAY."

 
Jiří Franta & David Böhm

BLIND MAN’S DREAM

 
Ewa & Jacek Doroszenko

EXERCISES OF LISTENING

 
Jan Poupě

SET OF VIEWS

 
Peter Demek

STATUS

 
Josef Achrer

BACKSTORIES

 
Radek Brousil

HANDS CLASPED

 
Katarína Hládeková and Jiří Kovanda

SIAMESE UNCLE & MONTAGE

 
Jiří Valoch

WORDS

 
František Skála

TRIBAL

 
Jiří Franta and Ondřej Homola

A BLIND MASTER AND A LIMPING MONK

 
Alžběta Bačíková and Martina Smutná

CARPE DIEM

 
THE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

THE FRAGMENTS OF SETS / THE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

 
Tomáš Absolon

MONET ON MY MIND

 
Kamila Zemková

THE DEAD SPOTS

 
Johana Pošová

WET WET

 
Ivan Pinkava

[ANTROPOLOGY]

 
SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

READY OR NOT, HERE I COME

 
Veronika Vlková & Jan Šrámek

THE SOURCE

 
Jan Brož

SSSSSS

 
ONE MOMENT / PART ONE: PRIVATE COLLECTION FROM BRNO

COLLECTOR'S CYCLE OF IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTIONS

 
Alice Nikitinová

IT WOULDN'T BE POINTLESS TO

 
Ondřej Basjuk

THE CULT EXHIBITION

 
Tomáš Bárta

THINGS YOU CAN´T DELETE

 
HE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

FOR MANY DIFFERENT EARS

 
Katarína Hládeková

TO START THE FIRE

 
Marek Meduna

AMONG THE DOG THIEFS

 
THE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

WORDS AMONG SHAPES / SHAPES AMONG NAMES

 
Lukas Thaler

THE PROPELLER

 
Krištof Kintera

Hollywoodoo!

 
Ondřej Homola

ARANGE

 
THE SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION FOCUSED ON THE YOUNGEST GENERATION

TETRADEKAGON

 
Tomáš Bárta

SOFTCORE

 
Richard Stipl

SENSE OF AN END

 
Lubomír Typlt

THEY WON'T ESCAPE FAR

 
Kateřina Vincourová

THE PRESENCE AS
A TRILL

 
SELECTION FROM THE FAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

OPEN

 
Christian Weidner
/ Vincent Bauer
/ Cornelia Lein

HERE AND
SOMEWHERE
ELSE

 
The selection from the FAIT GALLERY collection

THE SELECTION
FROM THE
COLLECTION

 
Alena Kotzmannová
/ Jan Šerých

A CHI-
LIAGON



JIŘÍ HILMAR / ANONYMOUS FORM OF SQUARE

25.10.2023 - 13.01.2024

Fait Gallery, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curator: Denisa Kujelová

Opening: 25th October, 7 pm

 

The early work of Jiří Hilmar (*1937) was marked by the art trends of the time, especially the principles of Concretism[1] (whose club[2] he co-founded in Czechoslovakia in 1967), as well as by the activation of the viewer, the processuality of perception and the thematization of movement. Kinetic objects in the form of mechanical machines and objects working with light sources and shadow effects[3]  were followed by several years of the artist's thorough investigation of the phenomenon of mobile procedural perception in paper reliefs folded into optical structures. These mostly square formats of various sizes produced an optical illusion through the movement of the observer and the change of his or her position in relation to the work, thus transforming the visual qualities of the surface.

In the square, whose shape the artist saw as an ideal anonymous form[4]  referring to the ideas of Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich or Victor Vasarely, he created structures in various systems according to mathematical principles and seriality from horizontally, vertically and diagonally arranged monochrome or multicolour strips of folded and, in many cases, also incised paper. The opto-kinetic principle was achieved by varying the height of the strips, their shape, the method and degree of their bending, the method of perforation, and also the shape and colour of the tempera used for individual fragments (most often circles and their sections). The variation of contrasts and intersections continued after his emigration to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1969, where he settled for more than 40 years.

The active involvement of the viewer was also part of the next cycle of works which were defined by a system of overlapping vertical strips or strings. In this new structural plan, in which one of the elements was always firmly attached to the base and the other hung freely above it, the works could again be set in motion, now literally, by the participation of the observer. Parallel to this, in the 1970s the artist created monochromes from layered tracing paper, fixed to canvas or wooden boards, most often also in square formats. The individual layers of transparent paper were only recognizable by their deliberate distortion with various types of creasing, perforation, rippling and gradations or variations of the repetitive regular patterns of the collaged fragments.

After moving to the Halfmannshof art colony in Gelsenkirchen in 1974, located in the heavily devastated landscape of the Ruhr area, Hilmar naturally moved towards environmental issues. In addition to paper, he began to incorporate into his reliefs natural materials such as jute, wax, kaolin and also wood, in the form of sticks and matchsticks. In the 1980s, when nature became an equal co-agent in his work, and creative intervention in natural processes started to prevail in his work, he turned permanently to a single material - wood. He partially dismantled the original autonomous shapes of branches and trunks and then reconstructed them by rejoining, tying or crossing them into new units of wooden objects and installations. He deliberately interfered in the originally round found fragments of trees in an invasive and openly completely contradictory square manner followed by a final gesture of re-rounding, in order to manifest the oneness of man and nature, which he sought in his work and life. 

 

Literature: 

HILMAR, Jiří, VÍCHOVÁ, Ilona, HIEKISCH-PICARD, Sepp. Jiří Hilmar/ Adagio. Praha, Museum Kampa – Nadace Jana a Medy Mládkových, 2015.

POHRIBNÝ, Arsen. Klub konkrétistů po dvaceti letech. In: Revue K, 1988–89, nos. 32–33.

“Optické reliéfy“ Jiřího Hilmara, Rozhlas, ČRo 3 – Vltava, Mozaika, 24 February 2011.



[1] The principles of Concretism were defined in interwar art by Theo van Doesburg, who first used and coined the term in 1930, and later in the 1930s by Max Bill, the main promoter of this art movement. De Stijl, the Bauhaus, and also the Russian avant-garde were followed in the 1950s by the activities of the Swiss neo-concretists led by Richard Paul Lohse, and partly by kinetic art in the Düsseldorf Zero movement, the GRAV group in Paris, the Gruppo N in Padua and the Gruppo T in Milan.

[2] Together with Tomáš Rajlich, Radoslav Kratina, Miroslav Vystrčil and the art theorist Arsén Pohribný he co-founded the KK/CC - The Concretists’ Club (9 May 1967 - ca. 1972), whose activities were followed by the new KK2 in 1997 and KK3 in 2007.

[3] In this context it is also worth mentioning hydro-kinetic objects from 1974.

[4]Optické reliéfy“ Jiřího Hilmara, Rozhlas, ČRo 3 – Vltava, Mozaika, 24 February 2011.

                                                                                                         


JAKUB HOŠEK / CHAOS IS ORDER NOT YET UNDERSTOOD

-

Fait Gallery PREVIEW
Dominican Square 10, Brno
18. 3. - 30. 4. 2015
Opening: 17. 3. 2015 at 6pm
Curator: Lumír Nykl

 
„Why do so many new abstractions look the same?" - Jerry Saltz, critic and theorist
 
„He is known to absorb all the flyers, album covers, blogs ... and then he gets it all out of himself in the studio" - Jan Lesák, visual artist, photographer
 
„I have already said to Hošek that the most beautiful thing on the exhibition was the radiator." - Karel Císař, theorist and curator
 
„Eight golden rings as if I was Shab-Shabba Ranks" - Darold Ferguson Jr., rapper and singer
 
Chaos is order yet undeciphered" - that is the introducing sentence of Denise Villeneuve’s movie Enemy. This fits very well to the description of the contemporary art and the exhibition of Jakub Hošek.
The compulsive need to find the cipher to his work hangs in a shared gallery climate every time, the fragments of shapes (either texts or pictures), he has impounded, leave the comfort zone of their original carrier. The characters then occupy space stretched beyond the reserved dimensions and levels of meaning.
In the "auteur" movie Enemy Denis Villeneuve develops the idea of ​​Alfred Hitchcock, which touches film and imitation in general - „If you meet your lookalike, you should kill him." The promise of understanding to the well arranged order in a chaotic web of symbols in Enemy is subject to (self-) destructive, (self-) identification of the identical lookalike. In the case of Jakub Hošek this ambiguous relationship can be seen mainly on the level of the key process of transferring carved drawing templates to a canvas otherwise processed as a "painting". As an implication the key drawings give the final object a possibility to be created thanks to their distruction. The free ride on the hanging painting is what makes the three-dimensional object what it is. These characteristics of used techniques and media Jakub Hošek uses as a theme since the time of study at the Academy of Fine Arts in the studio of V. Skrepl and J. Kovanda. The exhibition in the FAIT GALLERY PREVIEW takes place before his residency at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul and subsequent scholarship in Tabačka Kulturfabrik – a cultural center in the eastern Slovakian town of Kosice.
 
In the movie Enemy we do not find out whether both of the lookalikes have a scar in the same place. The order to the chaos of their resemblances is brought by a sore imprint of a ring worn by only one of them.
The understanding is a mutual, time-consuming process compared to the privileged, distant decryption. When you decrypt the object it is subordinate to the colonizing hunter of the meaning. In the act of understanding the viewer and the image have a similar relationship to that seen between drawing and painting in Jakub Hošek’s work, between the flat painting and the three-dimensional object, between a sign and an ornament. As people say: we usually start to understand the text once we stop following it.
The flat hanging painting changes in the three-dimensional box. The cutter is thus connected by a brush stroke. The ring serves as a boxer. Acrylic tattoos the canvas.
The change is possible as long as the term period is replaced by a simple piece of information edited in the social networks.
 
The described characteristics of the Jakub Hošek’s art work explain the meaning of overlaping of the first and the second/the chaos and the order. The assumptions of his work can be compared to a specially conceived process of superimposition - covering of an already existing image by another. Jakub Hošek acknowledges this method by a conscious reference to this word in an otherwise unusual plural - Superimpositions, which is the title of the new album by the experimental electronic producer Lorenzo Senni.
The critic Alexander Iadarola (Quietus, dismagazine, Rhizome) notes Senni‘s sinister aspect of the superimposition. "Whereas with palimpsests one can see the traces of previous writers' markings as they're written the effaced over, with a superimposition there's no trace, no hint of what was before". The area of ​​design and fine arts have already overlaped a long time ago at least in the consensual label of the artwork - "a piece". In the global arts community the term piece is as popular as the term "track" within the club music scene. Piece sounds equally expressive and convincing, especially considering the nature of Hošek‘s images.
 
In the well arranged area of a white showroom a value of one piece corresponds with the value of another one. This isomorphic relationship is also characteristic for objects - forms on the picture - between them. The uniformity also establishes the relationship of the shown forms towards their physical carrier. Of a final piece and the cardboard models, sentenced to the fate of being waste material. The exhibition, understood in the general sense of exposing the objects to human view, actually begins and ends with a gallery shop window, where the residual cardboard represents a sort of preview of the author's main method, metaphorically also a preview of his studio and portfolio. We can remember his exhibition in Ostrava Industrial Gallery in 2013 and the installation solution of adjusting the preparatory drawings on paper to the level of works on canvas. But especially here  resonates his well-known project called Let me rule in Jiří Švestka Gallery, where the studio  chaos was scenographically transferred and copied in the ratio of one to one.
 
Style known from Let me rule dominates even in the (...) previously unrecognised order. Recognisable style that can be conveniently described by the familiar English word creepy.
Parts of cut hands are touching crooked, jagged, almost "crossed" wasters of the original shapes. Swollen and frayed tissue that has lost prosthetic drawing, are chaotically crawling over each other and seeking support in the precisely made and graduated surface. The degrees of the surface are being given to us in one lot and as tightly as barbed wire allows.
The paintings by Jakub Hošek behave like an evil twin and hurt even what is depict.
The quotations do not refer to the source, the cutter works as it should only at the final stopper.
The blending of the shapes is always an intersection at first, no form passes through the another one unscathed.
Hošek‘s often attributed comic abbreviation is associated with the image of the latent immobilisation of animated film sequences, where the chaos of a pair of images is moved to the proper movement by a human agent. He takes on the form of the hands, eyes, or a false frame as a trickish, crippled lookalike. And if he is not destroyed in the logic of Hitchcock’s quoted aphorism, he is trying to move the current viewer to understand and protect him.
  
Against what? Perhaps against the diffusion of the wild culture, ie unframed areas, "which do not have any denotation", as we are informed by the Bourriaudious Daily application. Adverse uncomfortable sensations and our memories jump at us from Jakub Hošek’s picture as spam, and a creepy adware ad:
"Eat this and you will never want to paint again. The doctors call this the cutter for the art. "
 
Lumír Nykl
 

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