Adriena Šimotová: Brno ’86

The starting point was the exhibition at the Dům pánů z Kunštátu in Brno, which Jiří Valoch prepared in April 1986. Photographs by Hana Hamplová and Bohdan Holomíček captured the show, which drew the entire Brno art community, and two special buses of visitors arrived from Prague, along with a large delegation from Olomouc and Bratislava. Adriena Šimotová’s friends and an almost complete “forbidden” art scene of the time filled the courtyard in front of the gallery. It was a manifestation of solidarity, and the air carried the subtle beginning of the cultural and social thaw associated with “perestroika”. It was Adriena Šimotová’s first presentation in an official institution since 1968. The current exhibition, in its concept, fits the increasingly popular genre of the “exhibition about an exhibition”. It is an ideal reconstruction of the one from forty years ago, bringing together the works shown then and the original works by Adriena Šimotová that are available and identified today, together with archival materials and documentary photography. It also presents what preceded the Brno exhibition and fundamentally influenced the artist’s work of the 1980s: her repeated summer stays in the former Franciscan monastery in Hostinné in the Podkrkonoší region. There Adriena Šimotová discovered a special way of working with paper: hand perforating, tearing and touching.

The works were lent by leading public institutions and private collections. The exhibition is thus the result of cooperation between the Moravian Gallery in Brno and the Nadační fond Adriena Šimotová and Jiří John. The curators are Pavel Brunclík and Ondřej Chrobák.

The exhibition commemorates what would have been the 100th birthday of Adriena Šimotová and the 80th birthday of Jiří Valoch.

Curators: Pavel Brunclík and Ondřej Chrobák

Graphic design: Lukáš Kijonka