Research into the Ornament Continues

Petr Kvíčala

 
JAN SVOBODA
JASANSKÝ – POLÁK
MICHAL KALHOUS
ALENA KOTZMANNOVÁ
MARIE KRATOCHVÍLOVÁ
MARKÉTA OTHOVÁ
& JIŘÍ KOVANDA

THE OTHER SIDE OF A PHOTOGRAPH

 
As Seen In Their Natural Environment

Jaromír
Novotný

 
A Spectre in the House

Tomáš Bárta

 
Gerbera won't break

Anna Ročňová

 
Interweaving

Michal Škoda

 
the little infinity

Marian Palla

 
Matter in Eternity

Habima Fuchs

 
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



Petr Kvíčala / Research into the Ornament Continues

26.03.2025 - 26.07.2025

Fait Gallery, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curator: Ondřej Chrobák

Opening: 26th March, 7 pm

 

The exhibition sums up the last fifteen years of work of the Brno painter Petr Kvíčala. The artist returns to the post-industrial environment of the gallery where he presented a retrospective of the first two decades of his work in 2008. In the imaginary total of both exhibitions, we arrive at an impressive time span of more than thirty-five years, during which the mentioned "research" into the field of ornament has been taking place. At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, Petr Kvíčala made a name for himself with an original synthesis of the language of geometry and postmodernism. This is how he approached the defence of ornament as both an issue of mathematical order and an aesthetic phenomenon of a fading reputation. Ornament was rehabilitated, and the red wavy line became Kvíčala's signature form.

Ornaments, along with the wavy line, most often in the shape of a crenellation or a zig-zag line, continue to permeate Kvíčala's paintings like a mycelium, sometimes hidden, sometimes explicit. This polarity is perhaps more distinct in the period covered by the current exhibition than in the previous stages of his work. On the one hand, there are paintings constructed by a fine ornamental network, as if "embroidered", from which geometrical bodies of delicate colours pop out; on the other, robust, almost rustic ornaments resulting from gestic strokes of a broad brush. In recent years, the dichotomy between subdued monochromy and festival colours has found a background in the artist's life, asymmetrically divided between the city and rural seclusion. The rediscovered closeness to nature brings back into Kvíčala's current situation reminiscences and updates of his artistic discoveries made more than three decades ago. Once again, woodworking comes into play, parallel to painting. Large wooden objects should be understood primarily as extensions of Kvíčala's painting into the third dimension, offering the viewer, among other things, an immersive experience of entering the "inside" of the painting.

Kvíčala continues to work in open cycles in which he explores, tests and exploits his artistic discoveries. The exhibition, tailor-made for the unique space of the Fait Gallery, is an opportunity for the audience and the artist himself to examine the results of this work. Petr Kvíčala has invited the artist Karíma Al-Mukhtarová to his exhibition as a special "guest". Intuitively, he feels a loose affinity with her work which he associates with a sensitivity close to the art of Eva Kmentová. If Kvíčala's construction principle of his paintings was named "manual geometry" in the early days, for Karíma Al-Mukhtarová, the manual approach is analogically vital - primarily the demanding work of embroidery, where the needle and cotton penetrate impenetrable materials such as glass or wooden beams. The hidden geometry principle, represented by the implied orthogonal structure that is inevitably present even in intimate handiwork such as obsessive embroidery, perhaps unsurprisingly meets the fundamental principle of Kvíčala's work, which is an interest in the order of nature and its disruption.

 

Ondřej Chrobák

 

Petr Kvíčala has created several artworks in the public space in Brno:

 

- a monumental painting on the glass frontage of the Passage Hotel (2019), Lidická Street 23,

- the frontage with figurative drawings on the new church of the Blessed Virgin Mary Restituta (2019), Nezvalova Street 13,

- the Zig Zag 3,2 sculpture (2014) next to the building of the Moravian Gallery in Brno, Husova Street 18,

- painting in the Festive Hall, a terrazzo floor and painting on the vaults in the Reduta Theatre (2005), Zelný trh 313.

                                                                                                                 


Tomáš Hlavina / TLNVXYK Puzzle

-

Fait Gallery, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curator: Ondřej Chrobák

Opening: February 22, 2023

 

In the local context, viewers are not used to the possibility of retrospectively looking back at the work of an artist "in the middle" of his career. In the (Western) art world, however, the literal term "midcareer retrospective" is used for this type of exhibition projects. An essential prerequisite for the appeal and success of such an undertaking is that the artist has a high-quality and large body of work from which to build a retrospective. Tomáš Hlavina is almost a model example for a retrospective in the imaginary middle of his artistic career. His consistent work spans three decades and has regularly attracted attention. Its beginnings were accelerated by the artist’s studies, environment and fellow students in Milan Knížák’s Intermedia School at the Prague Academy where Tomáš Hlavina enrolled immediately after its establishment in 1990. Since the mid-1990s, his objects and installations have formed an integral part of most of his generation's defining shows, curated by the duo of Karel Srp and Olga Malá and by the husband and wife tandem of Jana and Jiří Ševčík. At the turn of the millennium, Tomáš Hlavina was nominated three times for the final selection of the Jindřich Chalupecký Prize. His works gradually made its way to both large institutional collections and major private ones. Furthermore, the artist has headed the sculpture studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague for many years. All this makes an important prerequisite for the current exhibition recapitulation; at the same time, it opens up a space for new discoveries or a revision of the interpretive frameworks of Hlavina's oeuvre. 

Tomáš Hlavina’s TLNVXYK Puzzle is conceived as an exhibition of a single "meta" work to which the constellations of art objects arranged on the elementary plan of a board game are subordinated. The individual works are removed from their natural artistic context, chronology and theme connections. The codified rules of the game on the basis of which the objects have been moved and grouped are not part of Hlavina's plan. Instead, the viewer is invited to closely observe the situation and then enter the "game plan". This might give rise to brand new sensory interactions with the artefacts going beyond the artist’s original intention. Rather than the traditional principles of art theory and history, it seems more appropriate to apply to this experience mathematical models derived from game theory or, conversely, methodological approaches from archaeology and anthropology. One discovery can perhaps be generalized, that on the large-scale installation of the retrospective, an analogical situation is taking place, one which we have become accustomed to experience on a small scale when confronted with Hlavina's objects and installations. These are similar puzzles. Tomáš Hlavina very often employs in them objects and situations of everyday use, which he finely works, arranges and combines with each other or with similarly artistically transformed natural objects. At first glance, they resemble kinetic objects or variable structures, yet movement and rearrangement is only their seeming potential. Tomáš Hlavina draws direct inspiration for many of his objects from the study of ancient cultures, religions and philosophy, but their resulting material reality and poetic metaphoricity is stripped of almost all illustrative dependence. A special chapter involves the artist’s sense of humour which remains hidden under the surface but is a good insurance against falling into the clutches of academism. This is probably where Tomáš Hlavina's need not to omit the title from the process of finalizing the artwork but rather to rely on its evocative effect stems from. This is also the case of the title of the current exhibition, TLNVXYK Puzzle, which might sound like an instructional description, a reference to mythological archetypes or an unsuccessful anagram of the artist's surname. Last but not least, the Puzzle is an invitation into the artist's head. 

 

Project was created with financial support of Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and Statutory city of Brno.

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