Artists supported by the Jana and Milan Jelinek Foundation

August 18 – November 19, 2006

National Gallery in Prague, Veletržní Palace, respirium and gallery of the 5th floor

The exhibition is organized by the Jana and Milan Jelinek Foundation in co-operation with the National Gallery in Prague – Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art

Concept: Milan Jelínek, Milan Knížák, Helena Musilová

Curator: Helena Musilová

Layout of printed materials: Nora Procházková

The tradition of collecting and art patronage in the Czech Lands, which had flourished since the nineteenth century was coercively disrupted by the Communist coup in 1948; the totalitarian state supported predominantly a type of art which celebrated and promoted the regime. After the so-called Velvet Revolution in 1989 and the resulting changes of social circumstances, the once working and obvious structures have been restored only gradually but a role of state continues to be important as a sponsor of selected projects, mainly through a distribution of grants and the like. In the non-state sphere, however, private collectors, patrons of art and donors ready to “take chances” and sponsor contemporary, especially young and therefore unknown and untrustworthy art, emerge but slowly. All the more so it is necessary to respect and appreciate the work of those few who are active in this field with a purport and awareness of certain continuity. The Jana and Milan Jelinek Foundation has engaged in supporting progressive Czech and Slovak art in our countries since the early 1990s. In this relatively a short time, its sponsorship helped a number of young artists to enter the international scene. The Foundation seeks to directly sponsor young talented artists in the Czech Republic and Slovakia by purchasing their works of art; a process of selecting and buying such artwork is assisted by the rector of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and the general director of the National Gallery in Prague. The Foundation offers the artwork thus purchased to Czech institutions making it possible for several years to expand their collections of modern art with works of art by prevailingly young artists and build amassments reflecting the most interesting phenomena on the Czech and Slovak art scenes.

The exhibition presents new works of art by 23 sponsored artists who have consistently engaged in art making, also owing to the Foundation’s support. The display shows various forms of contemporary art, applied media and different artistic language, which attest to pluralism of our art scene, a phenomenon in line with the contemporary development in the world’s art. Curiously, the turn-of-the-millennium generation is rich in feminine element not manifesting extreme feminism, as one can see in the artwork of Milena Dopitová, Štěpánka Šimlová, Jitka Anlaufová, Dorota Sadovská or Dita Štěpánová. “Classical” painting is always inherent in contemporary art as shown by variants ranging from geometric vocabulary (as in the artwork of Mária Balážová) to many possibilities of figural painting (such as Dorota Sadovská, Roman Trabura, Jan Stoss) and gestic works bordering abstraction (such as Jakub Špaňhel, Petr Pastrňák). The use of the so-called new media is an integral part of the contemporary art scene, in the form of installation, video or computer art (Martin Sedlák). Neither neglected are various possibilities of sculpture and the art of object-making as seen in the artwork by Tomáš Hlavina, Milan Houser, Taťána Vejdovská and Jan Šerých.

The exhibition is accompanied with a catalogue.

Entrance fee:
Basic: 80 CZK
Reduced: 40 CZK

Opening hours:
Daily except Mondays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Contact for journalists:
Marcela Hančilová
Tel.: 224 301 167, 724 501 536, e-mail: hancilova@ngprague.cz

www.ngprague.cz