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



THE OTHER SIDE OF A PHOTOGRAPH

23.10.2024 - 20.12.2024

Fait Gallery, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curator: Denisa Kujelová

Opening: 23rd October, 7 pm

 

The artists of the collective exhibition The Other Side of a Photograph share unusual visuality, the consistency of light and the concept of individual photographs that challenge conventions. Selected works by the tandem of Lukáš Jasanský and Martin Polák, Michal Kalhous, Alena Kotzmannová, Marie Kratochvílová and Markéta Othová, in dialogue with Jan Svoboda's personal approach to photography and Jiří Kovanda's subtle interventions, allow us to glimpse, through their shared sensitivity, the hidden reality of the world in unexpected detail.

 

The selection of analogue, mostly black-and-white photographs seemingly captures what almost all of us see. In many cases, banal and sometimes even unphotogenic situations, often emphasised in a deliberately unprofessional manner to the point of amateur photography, are sometimes embarrassing. However, the mundane in them opens up wide boundaries of beauty that we probably would not have thought of without their help. Susan Sontag descrines it in the chapter The Heroism of Vision: “No one has ever found ugliness through photography. But many have discovered beauty in this way. Except when the camera is used for documentation or as part of a social ritual, what makes people take photographs is a desire to find something beautiful..."[1]

All of the artists, like Jan Svoboda (1934-1990) from the late 1960s, have in various ways transcended the established principles and canons of photography and in their distinctive approach deliberately questioned its supposed message and formal perfection, expanding it with new possibilities of treatment and perception. "The things I do show no artistry. And I want them not to. I want them not to be pretty, to be as ordinary as possible, not to dazzle, not to shock, not to surprise...[2] Just like Svoboda's work, the works of the mentioned artists have never aspired to conform to standard photographic practices, and like him, some of them have also expressed their opposition to the very term photographer. The theorists Pavel Vančát and Jan Freiberg introduced for their broader thinking and grasp of the medium the fitting tem of "nonphotography"[3] referencing the term anti- or non-photography coined by Nancy Foote in 1976 in relation to postmodern photography.[4]

What makes their photographs so similar is their sophisticated work with technical imperfection, the peculiar tonality of the narrow grey scale and often the use of large formats in sharp contrast to the intimacy and apparent banality of the chosen subjects. Like Svoboda, they focus on their immediate surroundings such as the environment of their homes and the ordinary objects with which we share our private space. In a photograph constructed as an autonomous surface, the role of light in its reflection and absorption is essential, and so is the relationship between objects and their background, with its demarcation often so subtle that the two planes almost merge. This is of course enhanced by the narrow tonality of grey in the choice of black-and-white photography: "Since black-and-white configurations are theoretical, they cannot really exist in the world. But black-and-white photographs do exist. They are in fact the images of the conceptions of the theory of optics, which means that they arose from this theory. [...] Therein lies their strange beauty, identical to the beauty of the conceptual universe. This is why many photographers prefer black-and-white photographs as they reveal more clearly the true meaning of photography, i.e. the world of conceptios."[5]

In regard to the legacy of Jan Svoboda and his exceptional sensitivity, the exhibition shows selected photographs from the broader oeuvres of the individual artists in which forms and procedures more or less referring to Svoboda's work can be recognized. Due to the very narrow theme scope of the exhibition concept, images from various cycles and in some cases diptychs have been selected in collaboration with the artists, and it should be noted that their meaning, which was established in the original context through the composition of their units, has been altered for this specific event.



[1] SONTAG, Susan. O fotografii. Brno, Praha a Litomyšl: Barrister & Principal a Paseka, p. 80.

[2] OTHOVÁ, Markéta; CÍSAŘ, Karel; JANÍČKOVÁ, Adéla, a NOVOTNÝ, Michal. Markéta Othová: již brzy. V Praze: Národní galerie, 2022, p. 7.

[3] VANČÁT, Pavel, a FREIBERG, Jan (eds.). Fotografie?? / Photography?? (exh. cat.). Klatovy: Galerie Klatovy / Klenová, 2004.

[4] FOOTE, Nancy. The Anti-Photographers. Artforum, September 1976, year 15, no. 1., pp. 46–54. Also here:

Douglas FOGLE (ed.). The Last Picture Show. Artists Using Photography, 1960–1982 (exh. cat.). Minneapolis: Walker Art Center 2003, pp. 24–31.

[5] FLUSSER, Vilém. Za filosofii fotografie. Prague: Fra, 2013, pp. 48–49.

                                                                                                                


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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