Art Review: NG 333 and ČEZ Group Award

It is the fifth time the NG 333 and ČEZ Group Award has been bestowed to a Czech or Slovak artist 33 or younger, but even with the imprint of the country's largest art institution and generous prize money of 333,000 Kč (around $17,000), its prestige is nowhere near that of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award, which was established in 1990 with the support of Václav Havel.

Out of 140 applicants this year, 11 finalists were chosen by an 11-member jury, and at the opening for the finalists' exhibition in mid-December, Jakub Matuška, aka Masker, was announced as the fifth winner of this award. He was presented with a symbolic check for 333,000 Kč, representing a purchase agreement for the National Gallery to acquire the winning artwork for its permanent collection.

The NG 333 Award has had an image problem from the beginning. It was initiated by former National Gallery Director Milan Knížák as a competitor to the more established Chalupecký Award (which previously had held its finalists' show and award ceremony at Veletržní Palace). In that regard, the NG 333 Award has parallels with the now-defunct International Biennial (later, Triennial) of Contemporary Art, which Knížák organized as a rival to the Prague Biennial (also originally held at Veletržní Palace) after relations broke down between him and the other organizers.

With Knížák's departure last August, this year's edition of the NG 333 Award can be viewed as only semi-transitional. Its organization was largely cemented in place when Vladimír Rössel took over as the new director of the National Gallery. As in the past several years during Knížák's tenure, Karolina Dolanská was the curator of the finalists' exhibition this year.

That and other things may change next year, however. The National Gallery reportedly is already in talks with Matuška about holding a solo show in the gallery and is discussing plans to change the award announcement's scheduling so that it takes place after the finalists' exhibition has been running awhile instead of at its opening.

Matuška won over the jury with his monumental (5x4 meter) Porn Bloopers (2009), an action-packed canvas combining elements of street art with more refined painting techniques that betray his academic training. He was also one of the finalists for the Chalupecký Award in 2010.

Matuška was not the only street artist among the 11 finalists. The artist who goes by the name Epos 257 also made the cut. He is exhibiting a paintball-splattered billboard accompanied by a video of the now-empty billboard support with cars zooming past it.

Joining them in the first part of the exhibition in Veletržní's vast atrium, the so-called Small Hall (Malá dvorana), are Slovak painters Ján Vasilko, whose three house-shaped canvases feature a mix of religious symbolism and clean geometric forms from the realm of auto-mechanics, and Samuel Paučo, who is showing textural paintings from his series Behind the Curtain that reveal strata of earth, mountains and sky.

Jakub Janovský's three black-and-white paintings with fluorescent outlining take a darkly humorous view of extremism and power.

Splitting the show between the ground floor and the Respirium on the fifth floor causes a schism in the show. And while some of the moderate-sized paintings get a little lost in the soaring space of the atrium, even more problematic is that some of the works upstairs may be missed by viewers entirely since they are hung on the back side of free-standing walls and are not readily visible.

The six artists whose works are installed upstairs (one is a duo) are painters Denisa Krausová, who was also a finalist for the 333 Award in 2009 and is showing three still lifes from her "Curiosity Cabinet" series, and Vojtěch Horálek, who has a series of cliché-ridden mixed-media paintings of Asian-run restaurant windows with a mix of Chinese, Vietnamese and Czech lettering along with storefront windows of hair and nail salons and Chinese Room, in which a Caucasian male wearing a conical straw hat sits reading a Czech hiking map.

The duo of Artur Magrot and Alessandra Svatek are showing a series of their street art interventions as a video presentation along with Super Trophy Art Kit, a tiger hide collaged from sales flyers and packaged in plastic like a dime-store toy (reminiscent of David Černý's plastic model kits) together with implements for its creation, such as a pasting roller made from a recycled energy drink can.

A video installation by Adéla Babanová, I've Been Thirty for Sixty Years wittily blends reality and fiction in a piece about a slowly sinking house and the ageless woman who inhabits it. Another piece incorporating video is Jakub Geltner's Black, Shiny, Hard, in which a piece of granite the size of a mobile phone when lifted from its dock triggers a video of two hands obsessively polishing the stone.

A sculpture by Jan Boháč titled Stasis is an orthotic-like device whose impact is lost without an accompanying photo of a person demonstrating its oppressive deformation of the human posture.

Considering the gallery announced the competition's winner before the public has had a chance to see the show and form their own opinions, coupled with the pricing policy, whereby visitors pay full admission just to see one short-term exhibition, it's no wonder that on a recent weekend the enormous Veletržní Palace seemed to have more museum guards present than visitors.

The policies of the past still reverberate in the atrium of Veletržní Palace. Breathing life back into this enervated institution and building up more respect for the NG 333 Award will take great effort. Let's hope the will is there.

In honor of its 216th anniversary, The National Gallery is offering free entrance to all its museums Feb. 4 and 5.

Mimi Fronczak Rogers can be reached at
Features@praguepost.com