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.
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Fait Gallery MEM, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno
Curator: Jiří Ptáček
Opening: 25th October, 7 pm
Jiří Thýn (b. 1977) counts among prominent Czech post-conceptual photographers of the middle generation. Over the past twenty years, he has explored the photographic medium and its relationship to other art disciplines: objects, installations, moving images, poetry, drawing and painting. Through these "other media", however, he has always primarily employed photography as a tool that allows him empathetic, emotionally tinged and unavoidably subjective insights into the problems that he sets himself.
Jiří Thýn's works are not only reflections of the photographic medium and its relationship to other art disciplines. In fact, the photographer always strives to open up access to the subjects that he feels are topical and urgent. They are usually of a deeply personal or even existential nature. Through his own and appropriated photographs, he conducts a dialogue with himself, exclusively in the mode of an image that he allows to slip out of the safety net of conceptual thinking, like soap from wet hands. Thýn wants to act through images, since he is aware that this leads to different findings, just like a poet views reality differently from a scientist. Perhaps this is what his experiment with so-called non-narrative photography was intended to lead to in the past; in the experiment he attempted to overcome the situation aspect of photographs through the gestures of their interpretation through abstraction, specifically decontextualizations and various immediate artistic interventions. For him, photography is a true "medium" that stands between the subject and the artist, enabling him or her to combine content and emotional layers into a single artwork.
If we were to find a common denominator of the collection that Jiří Thýn presents for the first time at the exhibition entitled Love Life, it would probably be a pictorial contemplation of the possibility and impossibility of distancing from the situations and events that surround us. Is it possible to move away from the tragedies the visual echoes of which reach us from all sides? Is it possible to ascend to the orbit of the Earth and look at everything that happens on it without bias? Is certain timelessness decent to those who live in the present? Doesn’t it make one an unsympathetic, condescending cynic?
Jiří Thýn's photographs do not give us answers because answers always silence questions. They are actually meditations on images of misfortune, death and destruction, phenomena that do not disappear, even if they take on new forms. The high resolution of the digital images offers a dangerously powerful sensory experience. But can one be dazzled by such images for their extraordinary aesthetic qualities? Or are such images meant to intensify the emotional effect, like the highly expressive and naturalistic depictions of suffering in late Gothic paintings and sculptures? Yet those were meant to turn our ancestors to God. What are these modern images meant to turn us to? The imperative in the title turns into uncertainty. Can you love life in all its manifestations, even the heartless and cruel ones? Is it humanly possible? Can one be ordered to do so? Or can it be strongly recommended? Or is Thýn just whispering these words to himself?
So love life if you can.