CONTEMPORARY CZECH ART
Second Collection of Janina Ojrzyńska
8 February – 14 March 2010
Vladimira Preclika’s drawing executed with the help of a typewriter, „Milana Grygar’s „sound” pieces and poetic paper reliefs by Adriena Šimotova: these and other works on paper by 11 contemporary Czech artists are featured at the exhibition.
Stanislav Podhrázský, Bez tytułu, 1981 Jiři Kolař – Callage, 1974
Most artists whose works are presented were born in the 1920s. Their formative years were influenced by the prewar avant-garde and inspired by close contacts with the French Cubists, Constructivists and Abstractionists. Works by two most distinguished Czech artists of the 20th century - Jiři Kolař and Stanislav Kolibal – are the exhibition’s highlights. According to Janina Ojrzyńska, Kolař’s art, transgressing boundaries between art disciplines and mixing diverse aesthetic means and media, is subjected only to his lively temperament and unbound imagination. These qualities underlie his piece featured at the exhibition: a prolage with outlines of musical instruments cut out from a painting reproduction with the voids filled with fragments of a map of Europe: the works is thus transferred into an altogether different dimension in both material and philosophical sense. Among the collection presented to the National Museum in Wrocław, particularly worthy of attention is the body of 30 “strojokreseb” (“machine drawings”) by Vladimir Preclik. The drawings have been “typed” like a letter, from top to the bottom of the page. “We rarely focus on the artistic form of letters and their shapes absorb us only as we learn to write as young pupils. Later in life, we walk around wearing “glasses” determined by our profession: through my sculptor’s glasses, my eyes perceive groupings of letters as sculptures” – the artist has declared. Of special interest are the pieces by Milan Grygar, one of the most resolute among Czech modern artists, Adriena Šimotova’s paper tissue reliefs underlain by expressive Surrealism (abstract or mask-like), Grygar’s original works reflecting his unique approach focused on the poetic and acoustic relations between the work’s painterly and graphic aspects and the sound produced in the process of its creation. Among the featured artists are also: Vaclav Boštik, Čestmir Kafka, Radoslav Kratina ,Jan Kubiček, Zdenek Palcr, Stanislav Podhrázský.
Janina Ojrzyńska, born in Lvov, is a collector and promoter of Czech art. In 1984, she presented part of her collection to the National Museum in Wrocław and in June 2009 she made another generous gift to the Museum.
ART NOUVEAU. GLASS
16th January - 3rd May 2010
A monumental vase by the famous French artist Emil Gallé, made of no fewer than 5 layers of glass, is a showstopper and the exhibition’s centrepiece. It is accompanied by a representative selection of French Art Nouveau glass from the holdings of the National Museum in Wrocław. France was a leading European centre of Art Nouveau glass industry and studio glass. In particular, artists active in Paris and Lotharingia proved a major force in pioneering the new style and innovative technologies.
Emil Gallé, a native of Nancy, a chemist and botanist who had also studied glass as his father’s studio, was the most distinguished glass artist working in the Art Nouveau idiom. His pieces first attracted attention at the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris in 1884 and were enthusiastically received at the World Expo in Paris in 1889 and 1900. Initially, Gallé followed in the footsteps of François-Eugène Rousseau (1827-1890), a Parisian artist who had first used the technique of wheel engraving and acid-etching the surface of glass and also elaborated the method of encasing pieces of golden foil in glass. Gallé worked in crystal glass, which he enamelled and engraved, and then explored layered glass, engraved and acid-etched. His favourite motifs referred to Nature and included stylised images of flowers, insects, and small animals. He is also known for his “speaking pieces” inscribed with fragments of his poems. The Atelier d’art of the brothers Auguste and Antonin Daum in Nancy became another important glassworks and its masterpieces of two- and three-layer glass were the tour de force at the World Expo in Chicago (1893) and Brussels (1897). The firm’s pieces with decorative motifs encased in glass were shown at the World Expo in Paris (1900). Characteristic of Daum art glass were plant and landscape motifs.
The National Museum in Wrocław’s collection of Art Nouveau glass numbers close to 100 pieces of which some 20 are French-made. One of the most interesting items is a tall vase signed by Gallé himself: measuring over 80 cm in height, it is the largest such item in museum holdings in Poland. It is made of layered glass, each layer being of different colour: pink, white, yellow, light-green, and dark-green. It is decorated with the image of kalia flower: its large yellowish-green petals and dark-green leaves set off by a pink, mat background have been rendered by means of acid-etching while subtle engraving reveals successive tinted layers. Another interesting piece featured at the exhibition is a work by François-Eugène Rousseau decorated with scraps of gold leaf encased in glass. Worthy of attention are Daum vases from c. 1900, made of layered glass with etched and engraved floral (magnolia and cherry blossoms, wild flowers) and landscape motifs, and the vases by the firms of De Vaz and Lamartine featuring three-dimensional vedutas.
CASSONE AND CREDENZE.
ITALIAN FURNITURE FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM IN WROCŁAW
November 2009 – June 2010
Italian Renaissance furniture is a relative rarity in Polish museum collections which makes this presentation of cassoni and credenzae particularly interesting. The cassone (“large chest”) were used to store valuables and clothing: particularly ornate were those forming part of the bridal suite. The credenza (sideboard) was a low storage cabinet resembling today’s chest and originally used as a buffet for tasting food before serving.
