The Gaspard of the Night exhibition emphasizes elements of the Gothic and the grotesque in works by selected Czech contemporary artists. The show thus functions as an anachronistic attempt to view the current, post-conceptual tendency through the prism of aesthetic categories rooted in Romanticism. It juxtaposes two types of irony: the romantic, in which an aesthetic experience allows the viewer to overcome his fear that grasping the world is an impossibility, and the post-conceptual, which appropriates cultural codes for the purpose of ridiculing them.
Title borrowed from a Frenchman
The exhibition title has been borrowed from the French romantic Aloysius Bertrand (1807–1841), who organized his poetry in prose for the collection Gaspard of the Night or Fantasies in the Manner of Rembrants and Callot. This work, published one year after its author’s death, was famous namely for one of the passages in its introduction: “Art, that philosopher’s stone of the nineteenth century!”
Participating artists
Daniela Baráčková, Jiří David, Marek Meduna, Markéta Othová, Michal Pěchouček, Jří Skála, Sláva Sobotovičová, Pavel Sterec, Ivan Svoboda, Jan Šerých and Roman Štětina.