Art historian Jiří Ševčík will receive an Austrian honor

Prague - Art historian, curator, and vice-rector of the Academy of Fine Arts Jiří Ševčík will receive the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art on Monday. The decoration, awarded by the Austrian Federal President, will be presented to him by the Austrian ambassador to the Czech Republic, Margot Klestilová Löfflerová. This was announced to the Czech Press Agency (ČTK) by representatives of the Austrian Cultural Forum in Prague.
The high honor is a thank you and recognition of the extraordinary contributions Jiří Ševčík has made in deepening Czech-Austrian cultural relations, they stated.
Ševčík was a research worker at the Faculty of Architecture of the Czech Technical University in Prague before 1989, and in the early 1990s he was the chief curator of the Gallery of the Capital City of Prague and from 1993 to 1996 he was the director of the Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery in Prague.
The Austrian Cultural Forum reminds that Ševčík has been collaborating with numerous Austrian institutions in the field of contemporary art (Neue Galerie Graz, Kunstverein Graz) since 1988. As a curator, he has participated in many major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna (MUMOK). He is a member of the international jury of the Essl Award, which is awarded to young artists from Central Europe by the Austrian Essl Stiftung, and he is also a jury member and co-curator of the Central European art collection of Erste Bank Group.
Ševčík has been the curator of the Gallery of the Austrian Cultural Forum in Prague since 2003. He has brought Austrian artists to the Prague Academy of Fine Arts as visiting professors and initiated close cooperation between the mentioned school and art academies in Austria.