The retrospective of Karla Malich will showcase his work over 50 years

Prague - A retrospective exhibition of the work of Karel Malich, who enriched Czech art with many innovative principles, will begin on Friday at the Riding School of Prague Castle. It showcases his work from the early 1960s, including his famous wire sculptures, reliefs, drawings, and pastels. Through a generous installation, the exhibition’s authors aim to introduce the visitor as much as possible to the inner world of the artist, who has spent his whole life striving to materialize the invisible, capture light and the flow of energy, and find harmony and balance.
     The author team consists of art historian Tomáš Vlček, gallery owner Zdeněk Sklenář, and Malich's student from the Academy of Fine Arts Federico Díaz, who is the author of the architectural concept. The main space of the riding school is conceived as a journey from darkness to light, from the unconscious to knowledge, as Malich has endeavored throughout his work. All of the author's works are in an open space that starts with darkened windows and ends in an area flooded with daylight. The impression is complemented by a custom-made carpet, which is also black at the entrance and transitions through shades of grey to white.
     On the upper floor, pastels and drawings are displayed, accompanied by Malich's text "From then to now back then." The exhibition will also feature a film by Martin Dostál about Karel Malich, titled "It Just Happens," which was produced from 1998 until January 2013.
     "The essence of Malich's work and innovation is a transcendence into a sphere that we have not seen, that we cannot imagine," said Tomáš Vlček to reporters. "We know that the world is full of events, energies, but no one has illustrated them to us. Malich opened sculpture and showed what is happening," he added.
     Karel Malich started in the 1950s with landscape painting. In the 1960s, he moved to abstraction, wanting to grasp space from within and breaking solid forms. Another turning point in Malich's work occurred in the early 1970s when the already internationally recognized author was not allowed to publish his works and closed himself off in his studio. He began to explore changing energies, flowing air, and the view of clouds. Pastels from the first half of the 1980s belong to a pivotal phase of Malich's work, in which the author fundamentally re-evaluated the reality of the surrounding world into subjective visions transcending sensory graspable space.
     Since 1982, the oval shape has appeared in the drawings, which continues to connect Malich's often very complicated and seemingly chaotic visions. The second category includes drawings that focus on capturing light events in their shape transformations.
     The Zdeněk Sklenář Gallery has published ten works for the exhibition - from the reissue of Malich's monograph by Karel Srp to the catalog to the translation of Chinese poems with Malich's accompaniment or a pop-up book for children with rhymes and Malich's drawings of animals.