<Muzeum umění> opened an exhibition mapping Czechoslovak successes at Expo

Olomouc – The Museum of Art in Olomouc is bringing closer to its visitors the Czechoslovak success at world exhibitions Expo in Brussels, Montreal, and Osaka through a collection of documents, author's photographs, and slides. The newly opened exhibition titled We Were World-Class! is based on the collections of architect Miroslav Řepa, who was involved with the world exhibitions, and co-authored the Czechoslovak pavilion in Montreal. The exhibition is accompanied by a video recording of the architect reminiscing over his own photo album, mapping the significant showcases of post-war exhibition design. It will be open until May 1.

The museum draws on its own collections for the exhibition, which were acquired thanks to architect Řepa. "It is a collection of highly sought-after works, radiating the nostalgia of world post-war exhibitions. Therefore, we decided to present the entire collection at the exhibition," said the exhibition curator Martina Mertová to journalists today.

The authors of the exhibition focused on capturing the period atmosphere of the Expo exhibitions in Brussels (1958), Montreal (1967), and Osaka (1970), where Czechoslovakia enjoyed global success. "At each of these exhibitions, Czechoslovakia triumphed without exaggeration, and the results achieved became an additional impulse for the quality of domestic artistic exhibitions or industrial showcases. Therefore, we took the liberty of setting aside Seville and Aichi, even though we also have visual materials related to those exhibitions in Řepa's collection," Mertová added.

For Expo in Montreal, Miroslav Řepa, along with his colleague Vladimír Pýcha, won with an architectural proposal out of approximately 90 submissions. "It was a miracle when a group of two young men dared to represent Czechoslovakia in such a place; I was 27 at the time. The pavilion received several awards, and we reaped tremendous success," said the architect today. Mertová added that it became the fourth most-visited pavilion at Expo in Montreal, with people waiting in lines for up to six hours. Three years later, Osaka followed, where the architect designed the Laterna Magika theater.

The acquisition of Miroslav Řepa's archive was ensured for the Museum of Art in Olomouc by the then curator of the architecture collection Jakub Potůček. "Before the first processing, it was a suitcase piled up in the shelves and several stuffed bags. They hid folders with hundreds of slides and a colorful range of documents related to the world exhibitions Expo," the curator added.

Architect Řepa is associated with Expo exhibitions in other years as well – at the exhibition in 1992 in Seville, Spain, he was the technical director of the Czechoslovak pavilion. He is also behind several exceptional commissions, for example, in 1993 under the auspices of Václav Havel, he was the curator of the exhibition of Jože Plečnik, and in 2001 he was involved in the exhibition Ten Centuries of Architecture. This month, the architect will celebrate his 92nd birthday. He is a member of the advisory board of the current Expo exhibition in Dubai and it is the first world exhibition in his career that he had to miss due to the high temperatures there.