Winter Selection 2021

The current exhibition strategy and actual exhibition Winter Selection is based on the connecting of authors represented by the Kvalitář Gallery with those who are new to our gallery and it’s concept. While the gallery’s focus has long been the mapping of Czech non-figurative painting, this is a boundary that we have now decided to cross. This however will not be a violent movement, but rather a gradual path of rebirth. 

If we wanted to find a unifying theme tying together the five exhibiting artists, it would undoubtedly be immersive introspection and spiritual depth in addition to the mutually visual harmony present in their work. Each artist searches for their own way of analyzing and visually understanding the world. These methods mirror the individual artist’s unease and desire to know.

Eva Eisler’s Venuses, glass sculptures, encourage an immersion into our own human primordial past, the very basis of humanity and the representation of the human form. As a sovereign theme in art and its age-old inspiration, woman hypnotizes, disturbs and enchants.

Vladimír Véla’s expressive painterly form is a deep testament to the uncontrollable folds of the human subconscious. The form found in his work gradually born, formed or materialized into a figure. Sometimes they reveal only a certain part of their nature, other times nothing at all.

Martin Matoušek often takes an artistic representation of landscape as his point of departure. He does this not only to create a painterly veduta, but also a landscape that is spiritual and universal, inviting the viewer to fall through endlessly.

Jiří Matěj’s work is a deep analysis of shape and form par excellence. The artist constantly poses questions while immersing himself into the essence of being which he elaborates on with the help of numerical relations, waves and colours. His work, just as philosophy itself, could be placed under the notion of piety.

Unveiling what geometrical shape, perspective or the basis of human vision means forms the difficult and deep questions that Jan Poupě has dedicated his professional life to. The paintings he presents provide the possibility of an immersive fall into the reality of geometric form while daring the viewer to take this plunge.

In the case of intermedia artist Benedikt Tolar, depth can be seen as part of the wide repertoire of the artist’s imagination. Just as King Midas changed everything he touched to gold, Benedikt Tolar transforms many objects of daily use into extraordinary works of art with extensive immersive potential.

In many cases, the exhibition artists are visually dissimilar. Even so, they are able to connect to the harmonious vibration of having a profound approach to understanding our world. In moving through the exhibition, perhaps the viewer will notice the gradual emergence of a human figure, seen now in the Kvalitář Gallery for the first time. Perhaps appropriately so, this figure is neither a woman or man, but a child.