Mikuláš Medek, Jan Koblasa – Despite the Ban

The exhibition Despite the Ban presents, through Jiří Hampl's photographs and works by Mikuláš Medek and Jan Koblasa from 1959–1963, their legendary exhibition held in August 1963 in Teplice – in the castle riding hall, in what was then the Klement Gottwald exhibition hall. In the development of Czechoslovak modern art of the post-war period, it represented an extraordinary and pivotal event. Unprecedented because, despite previous prohibitions, it unexpectedly took place, thanks to the good fortune of the so-called "merciful summer," which, due to Čestmír Císař, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia responsible for mass media, education, culture, and international relations, loosened the state's ideological regulations from April to mid-September 1963. For the first time, artists were thus able to present to the general public existentially oriented abstract works, which had been persecuted by the threats of the communist regime. With a magnificent, intellectually concentrated installation of paintings and sculptures, they courageously challenged, along with curators Věra Linhartová and František Šmejkal, the caution and hypocrisy of the local art scene; therefore, few missed it.

To achieve a similar conceptual harmony, the present exhibition focuses primarily on the works selected at that time; only if some of them are unavailable does it include alternative exhibits from that period. The creative and ideological concepts of the works lead to pause and reflection; they elucidate, often with humor and irony, persistent personal feelings, anxieties, hardships, and hopes not dissimilar to those we experience today.

With the intention of paying tribute to the art and courage of both artists, the current exhibition also commemorates the hundredth anniversary of Mikuláš Medek's birth.

In the captions, works exhibited in Teplice in 1963 are marked with numbers in square brackets and any differences in title or dating, which refer to the list of works in the Teplice catalog.