September 22, 2006 – January 14, 2007

The exhibition is held by the National Gallery in Prague – Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art

in the Respirium on the 2nd floor of the Veletržní Fair Palace.
Address: Dukelských hrdinů 47, 170 00 Praha 7

Curator: Tomáš Vlček

Realization: Svatopluk Máša
                 
Main partner of the NG: HVB Bank
Patron of the NG: Synot Lotto, a.s.
Main media partner: Hospodářské noviny
Media partners: Art&Antique, Classic FM, ČRo 3 - Vltava, Radio 1

Marking the birthday of Jiří Valoch (born Sept. 6, 1946 in Brno), the National Gallery’s Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art presents the artist’s current creative activity. Many art lovers have known Valoch above all as an art theoretician and exhibition curator. Yet he is an artist in his own right whose art initiated all his other undertakings. Since his youth he has devoted himself to poetry and modern fine art. No wonder that in 1963 he became dissatisfied with the possibilities of traditional, linearly written poetry and began to systematically experiment with visual poetry. Shortly, he became a representative of the Czech experimental poetry’s second generation, associated with such key figures as Jiří Kolář, Ladislav Novák and the creative couple Bohumila Grögerová – Josef Hiršal. It was then that he first participated in exhibitions held both in his home country and abroad, and published works in anthologies, magazines and memorial volumes.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Valoch viewed the typewritten rhythmic, optical and structural visual texts that bordered between poetry and fine art as exhausted. He delved into a new type of endeavour – conceptual art. Up to the mid-1970s he intensively explored the possibilities of photography. Either he modified certain verbalized concepts by changing the context (texts on the female body, in a natural environment, etc.), or he strived for the visualization of particular terms through a series of photographs that depicted objects linked through a common designation. Within the newly discovered sphere of activity, which was fully in line with what was happening on the international art scene, Valoch realized minimal body-related actions and interventions in natural environments. In 1970, he presented his first isolated notions which he labelled “concepts“. The year 1971 marked his first projects of minimal textual installations – exhibitions of a single word. However, with the tightening of political control in the 1970s, such undertakings could no longer be publicly displayed; therefore, until the second half of the 1980s, the artist’s presentations were limited to privately held events or were published abroad. This fact notwithstanding, his creative output continued to develop, especially in the form of works on paper and occasional installations. For a long time, Valoch’s creative activity was typified by extreme reduction to a single word or a word triad, which at times he would modify semantically by means of simple drawings or colour interpretations. These interventions were bearers of specific semantic complications or visualizations of otherwise unrealizable semantic modifications of codified meaning.

Over a period of time, Valoch’s installations or installation projects assumed the quintessential form of a single word or sequence of words. In the first half of the 1980s, he created series of conceptual delimitations, in which the author deliberately strived, through a rather large number of sequences, to bring into a common context characteristics of diverse hierarchic qualities (Milan Knížák termed them “Valoch’s novels“). Texts of this sort gradually led to the emergence of the second stream of installations. In them, he has been endeavouring ever more to create a comprehensive whole in which language sequences comment and specify one other in reference to a variety of contexts, starting with purely conceptual tautologies, to reflections of addressing the perceiver, to paraphrases and quotes from particular types of poetry that function as independent metaphors.

The National Gallery in Prague offered Jiří Valoch the space in the respirium on the second floor for a new installation of his characteristic textual sequences. An important part in them is played by the aesthetic quality of the forms of the selected script and the strong contrast of black words placed on the surfaces of all the walls available there.

In doing so, the Gallery wishes to pay homage to Jiří Valoch as an artist in his own right.

Admission fee:
General admission: 50 Kč
Discounts: 20 Kč

Opening hours:
Daily, except Mondays - 10 am to 6 pm       

Public relations:
Marcela Hančilová
Tel: 224 301 167, 724 501 536, e-mail: hancilova@ngprague.cz
www.ngprague.cz