Review: Reality: According To

There is an exhibition currently in the Václav Špála Gallery that features paintings Špála composed and that are signed V. Špála, but they are not by him. What, exactly, does this exhibition have to do with Václav Špála? Nothing and everything.

The paintings are not originals by Špála but are part of a conceptual exhibition by the occasional art trio called Reality, whose members are the prominent artist Jiří David and two of his former students, Milan Salák and Jan Kadlec.

They established Reality in 2003 as an avenue for making art interventions that relate specifically to exhibition spaces and commenting on contemporary art's dependence on the cultural and societal situation of its time. This is their fifth exhibition in the past decade.

The show was a last-minute replacement for a scheduled exhibition by the photographer Václav Jirásek. And it follows the prematurely closed laureate's exhibition by the 2011 winner of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award for artists under 35, Marek Ther.

This connection may be one of the keys to understanding the exhibition's multilayered concept. Linking to the name of Chalupecký (1910-90) by following a show related to it, loosely references the art theoretician and his role as chief curator of this gallery from 1965-70. In the era of Normalization following the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, Chalupecký was removed from the gallery, which held shows of officially approved artists until after the 1989 revolution, when it blossomed again under curator Jaroslav Krbůšek.

Václav Špála (1885-1946), for whom the gallery was named when it opened in 1956, was a Modernist painter known primarily for his coloristic approach to the landscape and still lifes, who often favored echoing the colors of the Czech flag in his palette.

Špála was the first Czech artist to be recognized with the title of "National Artist" after World War II. During the communist era, it became synonymous with "regime-approved," and from the many half-forgotten names bestowed with this title, Špála is among the few who still have a strong resonance. Over the decades his work has fallen in and out of fashion, but today, he is one of the most sought-after Czech Modernists among collectors, and his works have a prominent place in most major museums.

Regular visitors to the Špála Gallery will immediately notice that some alterations have been made to the space. There is now a sort of entry vestibule, and then one passes through a set of white-painted French doors. This change creates an almost homey atmosphere, and that feeling is amplified by the sparse, irregular placement of the paintings throughout the space.

All the reproductions of Špála's works were done by members of the group using the decidedly more "proletarian" materials of industrial paint on fiberboard than the more elitist oil and canvas Špála used in the originals. The group additionally decided to make all the paintings uniform in dimension.

The French doors seem to be another key to the exhibition. In the accordion-fold pamphlet published for the show, all the paintings appear to have been photographed through the doors, acting as a mask that both disrupts the view of the paintings and imposes a grid on them.

A large black-and-white photo of a home interior photographed through a set of French doors also appears in the pamphlet. Presumably it is the home of Špála. The image itself is a brilliant play of grids within grids - the small gingham checks of curtains seen through one pane, the larger checks of upholstery seen through another, a second set of similar French doors visible through a third pane.

Central to the show's concept is the reproduction of art works. Replicas - whether reproduced in an art book or, more recently, appearing on a computer screen - are the means through which many people "know" a work of art. The distortion of scale and removal from reality have become an accepted part of our relationship to art works.

Reality member Jiří David became known on the local art scene in the mid-1980s as one of the main figures to bring Postmodernism to Czech art, and so hallmarks such as paraphrase and intertextualism are another contextual undercurrent.

Additional clues to the group's intent in this show may be found in a line from one of Chalupecký's best-known essays, "The World in Which We Live": "Art discovers reality, creates reality, reveals reality, the world in which we live, and us who live in it."

Perhaps the metaphor of the French doors - as an obstruction, a mask, a gridlike filter for the perception of reality, of art and of the world in which we live - offers one possible approach to comprehending this exhibition.

Although the concept is rich with multiple and intertwined layers of meaning, the exhibition is likely to simply mystify viewers not steeped in the history of Czech art and especially the history of the Václav Špála Gallery.

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