Connection

The very need and ability to create art presupposes a heightened sensitivity, both to the beauty of the external world and to the dimensions of the internal world. But only a few artists have the urge – and the talent – to give artistic form to phenomena and events that transcend objective reality and subjective experience, are not perceptible by senses, and cannot be grasped even by our rational minds. These artists have the gift of disconnecting from their own will, intention, and self-censorship in order to connect to transpersonal processes. This project is dedicated to these connected contemporary Czech artists.

The central protagonist of the exhibition is the only artist no longer living, Karel Malich (1924–2019), a solitary genius of Czech post-war art, who was part of the so-called New Sensitivity movement. In his lifelong work, he had been exploring the limits of sense perception and its connection to universal natural and cosmic laws through the prism of his own metaphysical experience. For Karel Malich, as well as for the other artists in the exhibition, drawing became the ideal means of expression, as an authentic record of immediate experience.

The spontaneous gesture of drawing, whether performed with a pencil, pastel, pen, or brush, allows the artist to connect to spheres beyond the senses. Drawings are usually created in a very short time span and thus map the phases of dynamic development of the phenomenon depicted. The repetitive movements of the drawing hand can accompany meditation, prayer, or the recitation of mantras, giving the act of drawing the character of a sacred ritual. And so, the drawers become mediators who gently touch the power lines of invisible energy flows and give us a message from the world beyond material reality. A similar principle of connected creation was also the essence of the drawings of Czech Spiritism in the first half of the 20^th century.

Artists:

Karel Malich, Margita Titlová Ylovsky, Jan Hísek, Jiří Kornatovský, Inge Kosková, Dagmar Havlíčková, Anna Šimková, Tomáš Lampar, Jana Kasalová, Josef Duchan, Petr Nikl, Přemysl Martinec, Taja Spasskova, Marcela Vorlíčková, Alžběta Krňanská

Curator: Terezie Zemánková

Architect: Mark Ther