Krištof Kintera

Bad News

Telegraph Gallery is not just our main exhibition hall. It is also the platform that forms the programme for several other floors throughout the building. And this time, we decided to replace the films in the Telegraph cinema with art for a few days, with a short-term exhibition of work by Krištof Kintera.

Krištof Kintera is one of the most active artists on the Czech and international scene. In 1992-1999, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in the studios of Jiří Lindovský, Aleš Veselý, Michael Bielický and Milan Knížák, and also completed postgraduate studies in Amsterdam. He has been nominated for the Jindřich Chalupecký Award three times.

Kinter's work includes smaller sculptural objects and monumental sculptural compositions, which he presents in galleries and public spaces. He creates often technically demanding, well thought out and subtly humorous kinetic or light sculptures and installations. The starting building material is often various consumer products and electronic components, such as plastic balls, drink cans, chandeliers, washing machines, bicycles and other objects. He alludes to the nature of consumer society and often asks himself and the viewer understandable questions about social or political issues. Another aspect of his work is his distinctive sense of humour, which he brings to his drawings, collages and especially his assemblages through puns on words, materials and other forms.

Many of his sculptural objects are located in public space. For example, the interactive electro-acoustic Public Jukebox, which is used to play music. Since last November, a set of Schools of Houses and Girl with a Dove - seven Prague realisations from the last century - has been on display at the entrance to Klárovo Park. Sensitively inserted into the uneven terrain, the concrete miniatures together reflect a traditional urban ensemble, based on existing, demolished or utopian buildings. There is no missing church, bank, television transmitter, department store, central telecommunications building, housing estate or hotel. This project was covered by the Kunsthalle Praha gallery.

Krištof Kintera has exhibited at renowned European institutions (most recently Kunsthalle Rotterdam, D+T Brussels, among others) and his exhibition Nervous Trees (2017) at the Rudolfinum Gallery was one of the most successful exhibitions in recent years in this country. Currently, his work is also on view at the Dox in Prague.

The exhibition Bad News will present a work of the same name from the Robert Runták Collection. An electromechanical object synchronized with a soundtrack, we decided to present it now because of its increasingly frightening topicality. The devil plays a drum and listens to a depressing avalanche of news from the radio about disasters happening in the world.