CT / After late for Pro: Officework

Curatorial text: After late for Pro: Officework  

Opening: 8th September 2017, 7pm
Exhibition duration: 8th September – 10th November 2017
Artists: Igor Hosnedl, Anymade Studio (Petr Cabalka, Filip Nerad)
Curator: Tereza Jindrová  

Exhibition After late for Pro: Officework is a free continuation of previous cooperation between artist Igor Hosnedl and designers from the Anymade Studio, Petr Cabalka and Filip Nerad. This year’s Hosnedl’s online presentation Slow Print on the Art Viewer Platform gained its specific contours thanks to the graphic framework created for this purpose by Anymade.  

We can also perceive a portent of the present exhibition in the one man show Dutch Harbor, prepared by Igor Hosnedl for the Jelení Gallery in Prague last spring. At that time the artist attempted a sort of deconstruction of his own creative process, suggesting its complexity through the presentation of canvasses together with drawings and spatial installation of isolated pictorial elements. The point was among other things to express an attitude which does not necessarily put emphasis on a single painting as the resulting artifact but, in the artist’s own words, points out that “the perception of one canvas is connected to a larger complex of what preceded the picture or what followed. The painting itself cannot tell everything about what happens in the course of its creation, and that is why there are other media, other means of expression”.   

In parallel with the “traditional” painter’s modes of expression, Hosnedl develops formal experiments characterized by testing materials he does not confront himself with in painting, and also by extracting specific motives of shapes and translating them into 3D space. The sculptures at the current exhibition can be perceived as a bridge between the small size objects prepared for the Slow Print and older pictorial cycles such as Nymphius or Emerald Basilisk (2015), from which the artist borrows the motif of a calligraphic line reiterated both on the surface and in the shapes of objects themselves.   In the current exhibition project, Hosnedl pushed his tendency “to verify certain questions or problems coming up during everyday studio work” even further than before, by letting yet another creative entity enter the process. The studio where Petr Cabalka and Filip Nerad work is just across a corridor from Hosnedl’s own; thus mutual discussions as well as subconscious “intake” of creative impulses and overall atmosphere happens on everyday basis. The graphic designers entered the project for the Kostka Gallery with the “task” to select and transform random elements from Hosnedl’s drawings. To accomplish this task they chose typical graphic tools and media (banner, poster), yet in a non-standard, freely creative way. Anymade, whose creation in the long run is being characterized by playfulness, high artistic quality and general experimentation disturbing the borders of “utility design”, quite naturally entered the waters of fine art at the Kostka Gallery, not considering such classification important in any respect. The poster visitors may take away with them from the exhibition fulfills, on the one hand, its classical informative function, however it is more than just a poster in the framework of the exhibition. The large-sized banners that originally should have formed just a background for Hosnedl’s objects sitting on base broke free from this intention, creating their own composition in space. At the same time one can perceive them as representation of a sketchbook, a decorative pattern abstracted from it and captions describing the artwork.  

If these works of Anymade are a hybrid blend of a designer’s “commission” and artistic installation, the question suggests itself whether similar hybridization occurs also on the side of Igor Hosnedl. The answer may be found in the artist’s long-term fascination with typographic symbols. As Hosnedl declared in the past: “I have been interested in letters for a long time. In my previous creation I connected literary inspiration with pictorial styling of letter-resembling shapes. The graphic form is necessary to me as it can serve as a substitute for any real clues, a real representation.” The exhibited objects can also be interpreted (apart from their organic connotations) as letters of a kind, just inscribed in space. Concerning the intensity of mutual influence, in the future Hosnedl will most likely benefit from this co-operation at least as much as Anymade will have done.  

Tereza Jindrová

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Open daily 1 – 8 pm and according to the evening program. Voluntary admission fee.

The opening was the part of the event Public House.

Contacts:   Eva Riebová → gallery curator →  eva.riebova@meetfactory.cz    
Zuzana Kolouchová → PR  → +420 739 055 862 →  zuzana.kolouchova@meetfactory.cz    

MeetFactory is supported in 2016 by a grant from the City of Prague amounting to10.000.000 CZK. 
KT_CT_After late for Pro_CZ_ENG.pdf