Through fifty selected works of art, this book presents the first closer look at the collection of Kunsthalle Praha.
The mission of Kunsthalle Praha is to “connect the Czech and the international art scenes, to present innovative perspectives on the art and culture of the twentieth and twenty-first century”. To achieve this goal the recently published The Kunsthalle Praha Collection: 50 Highlights brings together fifty works of art from the institution’s collection from the early 1910s to the end of the 2010s. The selection includes famous artists from Western Europe, like Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Christian Boltanski, and Joseph Beuys, but the majority of the artists featured are from Central Europe. To name a few there are Slovaks (Július Koller, Roman Ondak), Hungarians (Géza Perneczky, Dóra Mauer), Bulgarians (Nedko Solakov), Austrians (Kiki Kogelnik), and of course Czechs (František Kupka, Milan Knížák, Markéta Magidová).
For each work of art, there are short texts and accompanying images. The authors of these texts include not only art historians and curators, but also artists, philosophers, architects, a historian, a theater director, and a writer. Their essays naturally offer a diverse range of interpretations showing that art can speak to us about a variety of subjects while providing space for us to formulate our own individual viewpoints.
The Kunsthalle Praha Collection: 50 Highlights not only gives a broader view of Czech and European art of the last hundred years, but as an object, it has artistic value in itself. Its beautiful blue color, graphic design, Swiss binding, and excellent quality of the prints and paper are a delight to the reader in their own right.
The Kunsthalle Praha Collection: 50 Highlights
Concept: Pavlína a Petr Pudilovi
Editor: Barbora Ropková
Introductory texts: Ivana Goossen, Barbora Ropkova, Štefan Toth
Graphic design: Pavel Tichoň