Countryside Therapy

This group exhibition of contemporary artists addresses the theme of the countryside as a place with transformative and healing potential in response to a range of civilizational challenges we face in today’s world. The contemporary idea of the countryside evokes a mixture of ambivalent feelings connected to numerous clichés and persistent cultural stereotypes. The current form and problems of rural areas are to a large extent the result of the violent collectivization of agriculture in the past, which led to the devastation of the landscape and the disintegration of rural structures, severing original social ties and ways of life. Traditional rural culture was misused by nationalist political ideologies as a form of national art and was largely emptied of its original meaning. Today’s countryside struggles with many issues, including a lack of job opportunities, poor transport accessibility, poverty, social exclusion, and limited access to education or healthcare.

On the other hand, in view of rising costs and housing prices in cities, the countryside offers an opportunity for affordable living associated with a different rhythm of life. In contemporary art and beyond, today’s countryside is becoming an authentic space—a path toward simplification, slowing down, and an escape from the constant overload, saturation, and fatigue of the online environment, in which we are disconnected from the physical world in the era after artificial intelligence and amid climate change. The countryside offers opportunities for active self-sufficiency, cultivation, community life, DIY practices, and traditional crafts and manual work, which bring satisfaction and haptic connection with natural materials and the surrounding world. It is a place for connection with nature, animals, soil, and natural cycles and rhythms, whose inherent components are rituals and festivals in their original meaning. In this sense, the rural environment is not a place of escape from reality, but rather an active therapeutic medium for healing the symptoms of modern civilization and a model for a possible transformation of social organization.

The exhibition explores the theme of the countryside in an associative manner through sculptural and painterly works by exhibiting artists for whom the countryside serves as a source of inspiration for their artistic practice. For some, this involves direct experience of living outside the city, connected to work and a particular way of life; for others, it is reflected in their approach to materials and themes within their work. Alongside works by contemporary artists, the exhibition also includes a selected work by Vladimír Drápal, a painter, graphic artist, sculptor, and educator who spent his entire life in Tvarožná near Brno. The rural environment—its inhabitants, animals, and nature—was among the themes to which he devoted himself throughout his life in series of reduced and abstracted visual and sculptural works.

Vladimír Drápal (1921–2015) studied in the 1940s at the Brno School of Arts and Crafts in the studio of Emanuel Hrbek, and subsequently at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague in the studio of Josef Kaplický. From the mid-1960s, he taught at the Department of Art Education at the Faculty of Education, and between 1974 and 1982 he worked as an associate professor at the Department of Art History at the Faculty of Arts of UJEP in Brno. Drápal was among the founding members of the Brno creative groups Profil 58 and Sdružení Q. He worked in graphic art, drawing, painting, sculpture, and ceramics. In extensive cycles, he depicted neighbors, villagers, motifs of horses, trees, couples, and Venuses in reduced and abstracted visual forms. Several of his works are located in public space and architecture in Brno, such as the relief Couple in the building of the Constitutional Court, the sculpture Venus near the Anthropos Pavilion, and many others.

Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00–18:00; extended opening hours on Wednesdays until 20:00.

Photo: Anna Treterová, Great Star, 2025, oil on canvas, 230 × 180 cm