ART IS HERE: New Art

The new exhibition presents selected chapters and stories of art after 1945. Its core is formed by the art collection and archive of Jiří Valoch – a key figure not only in Brno's cultural scene. The exhibition documents fundamental expressions of new art and maps its local prerequisites as well as international overlaps.

Jiří Valoch creates a central node in the art network of Czech and foreign artists, such as Dalibor Chatrný, Radek Kratina, Jiří Hynek Kocman, Dick Higgins, Ben Vautier, Heinz Gappmayr, Imre Bak, Dora Maurer, and many others. A remarkable testament to the richness of mutual contacts – despite closed borders – is the Invisible Sculpture by Joseph Beuys, which he sent to Jiří Valoch in the form of a postcard at the end of 1979. The very title of the exhibition: ART IS HERE was taken from postcards that Valoch exchanged with his friends.

The exhibition is spread across twelve rooms on the first floor of the Pražák Palace. A prominent feature is the hall with a slide. Visitors can slide down into the hall featuring Dalibor Chatrný's work from the renewed permanent exhibition of modern art on the second floor. Other rooms present post-surrealist work, land art realisations, or geometric abstraction. A separate room is dedicated to Jiří Valoch's text installations, which the author placed directly on the gallery walls. Another hall directly reconstructs the situation in his apartment, overflowing with art. Among the exhibited artists are also Milan Knížák and his postmodern furniture or collages made from vinyl records. Space was also given to the work of Marian Palla or Monogramista T.D with the title In Search of the Missing Picture Poem. His seminal processual paintings, which are exhibited together with photographic documentation of their creation in the studio on Kotlářská, are crucial.

A surprise in the form of an exhibited Tatraplan awaits visitors at the end of the exhibition. The artistically modified Tatraplan was created in the 1980s for the legendary play Ananas, directed by J. A. Pitínský.

The exhibition is the result of institutional support for the long-term conceptual development of research organisations (DKRVO), provided by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

Educational programs in the ART IS HERE exhibition were financially supported by the South Moravian Region.