Twisted nature

The gallery on the top floor of Malostranská beseda, which one used to enter by climbing four flights of sagging and creaky wooden stairs patinated from centuries of use, got a complete makeover when the landmark building it's housed in - the former Malá Strana town hall - was reconstructed. Now, a shiny new elevator takes visitors as far as the third floor, and while the ascent has lost some of its charm, visitors still have their breath, which perhaps will be taken away by the newly renovated gallery instead.

The space is fantastic. It has been opened up to the rafters, as massive, preserved wooden beams cohabit with newly carved ones, and some joists even marry old and new wood mid-beam. A major part of the building's reconstruction was to bring back its original Renaissance towers and dormers, and inside the gallery space visitors can step up to several platforms that offer a view out onto Malá Strana's main square. One of the towers is also accessible from inside the gallery.

This abundant showcase of the carpenter's craft makes a fitting stage for Michal Gabriel's exhibition, simply titled "Sculptures." Gabriel, who turned 50 this year, was one of the early winners of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award for artists under 35 (in 1995). From 1987 until 1991, he was a member of the legendary Tvrdohlaví, or Stubborn Ones, group, which pushed cultural boundaries in the final years of communist rule and paved the way for Czech postmodernist expression. Since 2007, he has been the dean of the Faculty of Arts at the Brno University of Technology (VUT), where he started teaching in 1998.

Gabriel does not exhibit very frequently in Prague, and his current show links back to an earlier show he had in this same space, which featured female figural sculptures, roughly lifesize and smoothly surfaced except for regular nut-shell incrustations. This time, he combines a pack of sleek panthers created using this same technique with a larger group of carved male figures in which the artist works heavily with texture and the characteristics of the wood - its grain, knots and cracks.

The seven panthers, made from cast polystyrene embedded with fruit pits, are solid, fluid forms with surfaces that are both perfect and broken at regular intervals. As a group, they are unified aside from slight variations in their postures. They face off against a far more heterogeneous group of men, hewed from large blocks of wood in rough but regular grooves, like a woodcarver's initial rendering, some patterned in more decorative circles recalling a tree's annual rings.

The dozen male figures are arranged in several smaller configurations, loose circles in which they confront each other or posture to establish social hierarchy, but each maintains a strong autonomy without any real connection to its neighbors.

One of the most distinguishing features of these figures is their eyes. Some have them, and some don't. What's more, of those that do have eyes, one has a realistic set of green glass eyes, for example, while another has two brass thumbtacks topped with a white paper dot. Mostly, the eyes are carved directly into the sculptures, even though they may just be smooth depressions in the wood.

Another noticeable feature of all these male figures is that their arms and sometimes also their legs are like extended hooves, thick and club-like on some figures and lean and flexible on others. A number of the sculptures are rendered in unlikely postures. An improbable twist to one's torso leaves the right foot pointing opposite to where the figure is facing, poised to walk backwards like the contrapassi in Dante's Inferno. One pivots and plants down a pair of appendages to become a human chair. Another one crosses club-like arms.

Several of the figures lean or repose on their limbs, using them as points of balance like built-in tripods. Sometimes the physical distortions seem to signal a metaphoric personification of the shifts (of blame, of responsibility) and contortions (of truth, of motivation) seen in human society. The diversity of the male grouping compared with the oneness of the animal pack makes a statement about the solidarity of human society.

While the panthers are smooth and perfect, the human figures are literally deeply flawed. Gabriel works with the grain, cracks, gashes and knots in the wood to emphasize this. One knot naturally becomes a navel. A deep gash running at a vertical slant across a male chest becomes a deep wound to the heart. The figure whose eyes are brass tacks (perhaps a visual pun on the English term for truth-telling) has a face that is otherwise blankly smooth; he crouches, resting on hoof-arms, revealing a prominent neck wound created by an imperfection in the wood. Nearby is a faceless male whose long, noodly arms swing front to back and back to front, creating a swirling posture vaguely recalling a dervish dance.

Gabriel's show seems custom-made for the newly reopened gallery, providing an excellent introduction to his work (the sculptures are supplemented with photos of his work in public space) and an excellent re-introduction to a venerable gallery, offering visitors an opportunity to look in on (and look out from) this landmark building, whose newly reborn Renaissance form has just garnered it a nomination for the Building of the Year award.

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