A jewel in a miniaturised gallery

Although the curator of the exhibition is the director of Rudolfinum Gallery Petr Nedoma, the choice of works and the concept of the whole installation was created to the minutest detail by Jan Hísek himself. To get a better idea of the composition of the whole exhibition he even prepared a model of the Small Gallery to a scale of 1:100, into which he placed colour miniatures of all the paintings. “In the end we moved one painting and hung another one about a centimetre higher. That’s all. In my opinion the whole exhibition is like a precisely crafted jewel,” says Petr Nedoma of the creation of the exhibition.

The inner cloud of Hísek’s fantasy

The paintings displayed in the exhibition in the Small Gallery represent various formal aspects of Hísek’s work. From small, richly-coloured paintings dedicated to individual motifs to several-metre-large fantastical, and sometimes even cosmic visions resembling the deep pictorial universe of František Kupka. “A specific feature of Hísek’s work is the almost ornamental  way of developing themes in unbounded space, where the logic of the visible gives so much to the service of the invisible, more precisely what is visible only with inner vision,” says the exhibition curator in explanation of Hísek’s unique creations.                                   

The painter who works at night

It’s quite interesting that the artist, who draws most of his inspiration from nature, prefers to work at night. Hísek doesn’t have to see the landscapes, plants, animals and human figures that he paints as they all come directly from his imagination. Individual motifs thus lose their real shape and change into symbols which dance before the viewer’s eyes as if in a dream. The paintings bear titles which could well be the titles of fairytales from a dream world: Stužkonoska (Ribbon-wearer), Půlnoční slunce (Midnight Sun), Vampýr (Vampire), Lev ve studni (Lion in a Well). It’s not surprising that Hísek regards Odillon Redon as one of his greatest idols.

The Midnight Rider exhibition is complete with a catalogue of the same title, in which the artist also contributes text and stories. Further information at www.galerierudolfinum.cz