Taking into account the work of the curators' team at the National Gallery in Prague and the results of the tender, General Director Rösel explained his decision as follows: "It falls under the exclusive authority of the general director to appoint collection directors, and I believe it is right to place confidence in those who have met difficult expectations in the Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art of the National Gallery in Prague. The Collection needs a firm hand, as everybody certainly agrees. I have thus appointed Helena Musilová, who has known the Collection and served the National Gallery in Prague for years and has the capacity to lead and represent the Collection. She is also familiar with the professional, programmatic, economic and legislative conditions under which the National Gallery in Prague operates as a state-subsidized organization. Let me wish Helena Musilová much success in her new position and thank Šárka Leubnerová for her successful temporary leadership of the Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art."

Helena Musilová (born 1974) is a graduate of Masaryk University in Brno (major: history and art history). After graduation, she worked as curator of the Collection of Photography and Architecture in the Art Museum Olomouc in 1998-2003. She has been with the National Gallery in Prague since 2004 while simultaneously working on her PhD thesis in Brno. She has worked as a lecturer in the history of art and photography at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague since 2005. She assumed a senior role in running the Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art of the National Gallery in Prague in 2011 under its temporary director Šárka Leubnerová, Director of the Collection of 19th-century Art.

Helena Musilová has worked at the National Gallery in Prague as a painting curator and has organized exhibition projects in the collections of 19th-century and modern and contemporary art. The most highly attended projects she has helped curate and organize are:

- Joža Uprka (1861-1940): a European from the Moravian Slovak Region
- Islands of Resistance: Between the First and Second Modern 1985-2012
- Theodor Pištěk: Ecce homo
- František Kupka: The Road to Amorpha
- Memory of a Landscape I Have Never Seen (1905-1943)

Press release of January 30, 2013

CONTACT FOR JOURNALISTS
Eva Kolerusová, Public Relations Department, the National Gallery in Prague, Tel.: 00420 724 501 535
e-mail: kolerusova@ngprague.cz