Jindřich Chalupecký Award
2014 Finale Exhibition
Roman Štětina, Laureate of 2014 Jindřich Chalupecký Award
Dominik Lang, Laureate of 2013 Jindřich Chalupecký Award
Waiting Room
26 September 2014–4 January 2015
Veletržní Palace (Fair Trade Palace)
National Gallery in Prague
Staroměstské náměstí 12
110 15 Prague 1
Czech Republic
www.ngprague.cz
www.cjch.cz
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Curator: Lenka Lindaurová
Jindřich Chalupecký Society and the National Gallery in Prague are proud to announce the winner of the 2014 Jindřich Chalupecký Award, Roman Štětina.
Štětina (born 1986, Kadaň, Czech Republic; lives and works in Prague and Frankfurt) studied at the Faculty of Arts and Design in Pilsen and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He is one of the few Czech artists who investigate the relationships between visual arts and sound. In his cleverly constructed installations (composed of videos, objects and sounds), the artist shows how the sensory experience can confuse the impression of what we really see. His winning entry to Chalupecký Award, The Lost Case, is a cinematic collage, which explores the detective genre by editing fragments of the legendary Columbo TV series. Štětina’s one-hour-long “new episode” deconstructs the cinematic vocabulary and blurs the borderlines between the character and the actor. The artist uses the editing processes to point out the movie industry’s efforts to retain the features of a popular character and to meet the viewer’s expectations. The Chalupecký Award’s international jury, chaired by the director of Bronx Museum of the Arts, Holly Block, and composed of the art historian Milena Bartlová, the artist Jiří Kovanda, the art theorist and director of the Slovak National Gallery Alexandra Kusá, the director of the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo Gunnar B. Kvaran, and the curator and special adviser of Bottega Gallery and Shcherbenko Art Centre in Kiev Marina Shcherbenko, appreciated the semantic richness and the experimental nature of Štětina’s project.
The award winner receives 100.000 CZK (4500 USD) to realize an exhibition and publish a catalog in the following year. Additionally the winner is granted a six-week scholarship in New York City as part of the International Studio and Curatorial Program organized by the Trust for Mutual Understanding. In 2014 the winner also receives a trophy, designed by a renowned Czech designer, Maxim Velčovský.
The other 2014 Jindřich Chalupecký Award finalists are:
Martin Kohout (born 1983, Prague; lives and works in Berlin and Frankfurt). He studied at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, Berlin University of Arts, and Städelschule, Frankfurt. His multimedia installations react to various situations, the elusiveness of today’s world and the inability of an individual to navigate it.
Richard Loskot (born 1984, Most; lives and works in Ústí nad Labem). He graduated from the Faculty of Arts and Architecture of the Technical University of Liberec. His first appearance amongst the finalists of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award was in 2012. Loskot works with new technologies, with which he experiments and creates new innovative systems, testing the limits of human perception.
Lucia Sceranková (born 1985, Košice; lives and works in Prague and London). She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Focused on traditional photography, Sceranková is interested in the relationship between a photograph and its very own reality, as well as in our ability to visually reflect and alter the reality which surrounds us.
Tereza Velíková (born 1979, Pilsen; lives and works in Prague). She studied at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design and the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and leads a private gallery called Entrance. Mainly a video artist, Velíková explores a theme of intimacy and liminal aspects of personal relationships.
The Jindřich Chalupecký Award is an annual award for young Czech artists under 35 years of age. Initiated in 1990 by playwright, writer and then president of the Czech Republic Václav Havel, academic painter Theodor Pištěk and poet and artist Jiří Kolář, the award honours essayist and philosopher Jindřich Chalupecký, a prominent personality of Czech art theory and criticism. Shortly after its creation, it became the most prestigious Czech arts award. Amongst the laureates are significant artists such as Vladimír Kokolia, František Skála, Petr Nikl, David Černý, Kateřina Šedá or the most recent laureate Dominik Lang. Throughout its history, the award gained international reach; two laureates, Ján Mančuška and Radim Labuda, are of Slovakian origin and the award had also been given to a Russian collective, Vasil Artamonov and Alexey Klyuykov.
From September 26 through January 4, the National Gallery’s Veletržní Palace hosts an exhibition composed of work by five finalists of Jindřich Chalupecký Award 2014 edition. Additionally, the exhibition Waiting Room by the last year’s laureate, Dominik Lang, is on view.
Born 1980 in Prague, Czech Republic, Lang graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 2008, while taking one year during his studies at Cooper Union in New York and the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague. Lang was the curator the Jeleni Gallery at the Center for Contemporary Arts 2007–11, and the assistant in the international visiting professor’s atelier at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague 2008–11. Currently he heads the sculpture studio at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague, together with the Prague-based curator Edith Jeřábková. Lang represented Czech Republic at the 54th Venice Biennale, In Venice (2011), with a groundbreaking large-scale installation, Sleeping City.
Lang’s installations reinvestigate the modernist tradition and combine it with current trends in presentation and display. His winning entry to Jindřich Chalupecký Award 2013, East-West, was a site-specific architectural intervention in which the central space of the hall of a functionalist building of the National Gallery’s Trade Fair Palace was arched over by the path of the sun which spans above the hall abyss between the point of the sunrise and the sunset from horizon to horizon, inserted into the exhibition panel. Thus the building itself becomes a mediator, glasses or observatory as well as a scene, defined field, on which the sunrise and the sunset comes closer, encounters and blends into each other. With Waiting Room—Lang’s current award exhibition—the artist continues critically investigating the institutional challenges of the National Gallery. A silent room which happens to be a room in a passage is filled up with empty chairs, donated by the current employees and immobilized as hectically elaborated sculptures—monuments—a portrait of an institution in transition.
Organizer:
Jindřich Chalupecký Society
Národní 11, Prague 1, 110 00
Lenka Lindaurová, executive director
T +00 420 777 553 652 / lenkalindaurova [at] cjch.cz
