The Gallery of the City of Prague prepared an exhibition of Stanislav Podhrázský

Broken Jug, c. 1956, charcoal, paper

Prague - A significant representative of Czech post-war painting, Stanislav Podhrázský (1920 to 1999), is featured in a new exhibition at the House at the Stone Bell. It is called Restless Beauty, and the Gallery of the Capital City of Prague has prepared it as a retrospective of his lifelong work. The exhibition includes works that have not been displayed for a long time, including loans from various galleries and private collections, among others from the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, which owns Podhrázský's drawings from the 1980s.
    According to the exhibition's author, Marie Klimešová, Podhrázský is one of the most distinctive Czech painters and sculptors. His uniqueness lies in a special combination of contemporary trends in art, primarily surrealism, abstraction, and new figuration, with a personal theme, emotional charge, and a completely unmistakable kind of painterly lyricism. Podhrázský is one of the few Czech artists who, were it not for the communist period, would undoubtedly have achieved European fame due to the timelessness and uniqueness of his work, the author believes.
    Through his early work, Podhrázský aligns himself with the radical representatives of Czech post-war surrealism; his close friends included Zbyněk Sekal, Zdeněk Palcr, Josef Lehoučka, Emil and Mikuláš Medka, and Miloš Chlupáč. The later work of the artist has a solitary nature and, besides surrealism, reflects formal patterns from other important stages of global artistic heritage, especially the Italian Renaissance and Mannerism. Alongside its unsettling quality, it is characterized by spontaneity, formal supremacy, and lyrical values.
    Podhrázský also worked as a restorer, and together with friends Václav Boštík, Zdeněk Palcr, and Olbram Zoubek, he significantly contributed to the restoration of Renaissance sgrafitto at the Litomyšl Castle, where he personally composed several lunette scenes. The facade restoration was carried out in the 1970s when they could not devote themselves to their free creation.
    The gallery at the House at the Stone Bell consists of two exhibition spaces over two floors. Therefore, at the midpoint of the exhibition tour, the viewer must always leave the exhibition, return to the staircase, and re-enter it upstairs. The architect of the current exhibition, Josef Pleskot, managed to connect both spaces. "Where there is no circle or loop, there can be no climax," he said. He therefore made accessible the rarely used historical spiral staircase at the end of the first part of the exhibition, which allows people to continue the tour without interruption.
    The retrospective at the House at the Stone Bell, along with the publication of a monograph (Arbor Vitae), should, according to Klimešová, contribute to a deeper assessment of Podhrázský's lifelong work.


Supplemented by the editorial staff:

Stanislav Podhrázský - Restless Beauty
October 25, 2013 - February 23, 2014
House at the Stone Bell, Old Town Square 13, Prague 1
Curator: Marie Klimešová
Architectural Solution: Josef Pleskot, AP ATELIER Norbert Schmidt, Michaela Zucconi
Graphic Solution: Filip Skalák