Exhibition talk
Words of Dalibor Chatrný

You are warmly invited to a guided tour of the exhibition Words of Dalibor Chatrný, which will take place on Tuesday, May 5 at 5:00 PM at the Jaroslav Král Gallery in the House of Arts at Malinovského Square. The exhibition will be guided by curator Alena Pomajzlová.

Admission: 100 CZK
Tickets will be available via GoOut.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Dalibor Chatrný’s work is exceptional within Czech art in terms of its scope and the breadth of experimental approaches, its search for new paths, and the artistic and philosophical questions it raises. From his extensive and diverse body of work, the exhibition focuses on a specific group of works created from the late 1960s onward, generally referred to as “word-based works.”

In these works, he deliberately explored questions of words and language, the meanings of words, the relationships between signifier and signified, and the connections between verbal and visual (pictorial) expression. However, he did not belong to those strictly defined conceptual artists who rejected the aesthetic aspect of the artwork. On the contrary, Chatrný remained a painter and, alongside his detailed examination of language, words, and individual letters, he strongly emphasized the visual form of his word-based works, in which color, expressive handwriting, and gesture played an important role.

He was interested not only in the semantic aspect of words, but also in the structure of texts, which he translated into another, visual language. He sought meaning in the visual composition itself, in seemingly text-based abstract elements. His exploration of verbal signification in connection with visual elements opened up new ways of perception and revealed possibilities for entirely new interpretations, also addressing more general questions. Through the breadth of issues he examined in this field, Chatrný made an extraordinary contribution not only to Czech visual art.

The exhibition, conceived as the final event in the series Dalibor Chatrný 100, draws on insights by curator Alena Pomajzlová, recently published in the book To See and/or to Read: Chapters on the Relationship between Image and Word in Modern Art.

Photo: Krok noc, 1979, ink, acrylic, paper, 30 × 42 cm