Photographs at Letná remind of the author of the Stalin monument

Prague - The work and tragic end of the life of sculptor Otakar Švec seeks to be remembered by artist Martin Zet. He chose a location most associated with Švec's name - the site of the former Stalin monument, of which he was the sculptor. However, he did not live to see its unveiling, as he committed suicide during the completion of the project. To illustrate that Švec created other works, and to remind of his fate, six portraits of Czech artists by Švec will be on display starting today until May 28 on the wall of Letná Park.
Zet's project is titled The Fate of the Nation and is a continuation of last year's program at the Gallery On the Wall. This year, four projects by contemporary artists will also be presented along the Vltava riverbank near the entrance to the Letná tunnel until the end of October.
The first of these is a photographic series by Martin Zet. "Six sculptural portraits of prominent figures in Czech art by Otakar Švec evoke not only the personal tragedy of the modernist sculptor but also the forgetting characteristic of the Czech nation's memory, which likes to suppress the paradoxes accompanying the dark sides of its own history," the project's author believes.
Otakar Švec (1892 to 1955) studied sculpture under Josef Václav Myslbek and Jan Štursa, later he became a teacher at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts and exhibited at representative exhibitions in Venice, Paris, and Philadelphia. From the 1920s to the 1940s, he created several monuments and figurative sculptures for architecture. For his project, which recalls Švec's fate but also addresses the question of the nation's memory and the personal responsibility of the artist, Zet selected portraits of Josef Bohuslav Foerster, Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich, Vítězslav Nezval, Jan Neruda, and Vítězslav Novák.
Švec's work from the first half of the 20th century starkly contrasts with his involvement in the creation of the Stalin monument. In 1949, he applied, like many other Czech sculptors, to a generously funded sculptural competition for a monument designed for the edge of Letná Plain. To his surprise, he won the competition. He created a work that became a celebration of one of the greatest mass murderers of all time. A few days before the unveiling of the monument, on April 4, 1955, he committed suicide - a year after his wife took her own life. The Stalin monument was unveiled on May 1, 1955, and the sculpture was demolished in 1962.
Martin Zet's project was prepared by the Center for Contemporary Art Prague with financial support from the Ministry of Culture, the State Culture Fund, and the City of Prague.
The Gallery On the Wall was established last year with the aim of revitalizing public space in Prague and stimulating public discourse about contemporary art. The exhibition space consists of eight stone frames measuring four meters by 2.4 meters. They once served communist propaganda, and the only use of the wall after 1989 was a six-month exhibition by American artist Barbara Benish in 2000, when she hung large paintings of colorful hippie flowers on the wall.
Last year, four artists exhibited as part of the Gallery On the Wall program. The same will happen this year. After Zet's project, the group Pode Bal will prepare an exhibition at the end of May, followed by a new work by Míla Preslová, and at the beginning of September, the artistic group Matky & Otcové will present their project.