"The delta of all the rebellions and experiments of the 20th century: the Golden Sixties." With this sentence begins the introductory text by curator David Voda for the seventh room of the Signal III exhibition, "We are the Revolution," also curated by architect Mark Thera. Just entering the room surprises the visitor. The uncensored artwork of the 1960s awakens the viewer's imagination. The artist and illustrator Teodor Rotrekl, for example, appears among the rich selection of artists. His painting entitled Share of Work to Humanize the Monkey is located opposite the main entrance. The dominant element of the work is the brain and splitting atom from Oppenheimer's memento. The artist uses this to somewhat sarcastically point out the misuse of the inventions of human reason to worship technology and consumerism. Compared to Western countries, the cultural and artistic-social platform in Czechoslovakia developed differently between 1948 and 1989 due to political conditions. The Czech art scene was almost isolated from the main modernist centres, which caused the emergence of specific artistic expressions. As the curator writes, "abstract art ended up in the toy-house of psychedelia and op-art, the sexual revolution was reincarnated in Marxist feminism, the Bauhaus ended up in Lettrism, the anti-art of Dada resulted in conceptualism."
The artwork is also enhanced by display cases of photographs depicting manifestos and performances. One of them is Experimental Flower by Vladimír Havlík, which he planted in the pavement of Olomouc Square in the 1980s. An important element of the room is the white carpet, which evokes a feeling of comfort and at the same time gives the somewhat wildly coloured and shaped space its order. The cosy atmosphere of the whole room is complemented by the object Pendulum by Jiří Bielecky. In terms of content, the room is really rich. In addition to the aforementioned artists, we can also take a look at the work of Rudolf Němec, Jiří Balcar, Eduard Ovčáček, Dalibor Chatrný, Karel Trinkewitz, Jaroslava Kurandová, Běla Kolářová, Otakar Slavík, Adriena Šimotová, Jan Steklík, Miroslav Moucha, Jan Wojnar, Milan Knížák, Karel Adamus, Libuše Niklová, Jiří Kubovský, Jiří Kolář and Vladislav Mirvald.
By Romana Bocková / Telegraph Gallery
Photo: Matěj Doležel
