| | PRESS RELEASE
FROM PRAGUE WITH BECKETT AT CORK VISION CENTRE
| 28th July: Cork: September sees the influence of Samuel Beckett surface in Cork in the shape of Cloudburst – A Prague Catstrophe a major exhibition by the non-conformist Czech artist Jiří Sozanský.
Curated by Professor Jiří T.Kotalík, Cloudburst – A Prague Catastrophe is both a photographic record of and a visual response to the extensive flooding of Prague in 2002.
Consisting of a series of works in mixed media from photography to paintings and site specific performances, Cloudburst – A Prague Catastrophe continues Sozanský‘s lifelong artistic exploration of people in extreme situations - a standing topic of Sozanský's art.
Over the course of 30 years Sozanský has concentrated on the holocaust, the war in Bosnia, people trapped and persecuted by totalitarian regimes, outsiders for social and political reasons. In his etchings, drawings, sculptures, paintings and collages he returns to these subjects again and again, often incorporating texts into his pictures.
In Samuel Beckett Sozanský found a kindred soul - fully in line with his approach to the topic of people on the fringe, of outsiders - and outcasts.
The 2002 Prague floods added a new dimension to their marginalization. Karlín, a disadvantaged Prague borough, was particularly badly hit by the floods. Everybody was affected, with the evacuation of almost the entire area but outsiders were particularly badly hit. Sozanský decided to help bring life back to Karlín and launched several projects for its revival. He exhibited his paintings in Karlín - not in galleries, but in the streets, on railway embankments, on crumbling delapidated walls, everywhere. And Beckett spoke to people from many of these pictures. The exhibition takes its title from Beckett‘s play Catastrophe which he dedicated to Vaclav Havel, Czech writer; dissident and first President of the Czech Republic.
Quotations from Beckett's Stories and Texts for Nothing (Czech translation, published in the 1960s) found their way not only into Sozanský's paintings and engravings - the incorporation of literary texts into pictures is a typical feature of Sozanský's art - but also into the script of the performances. With the Teatr Novogo Fronta (New Front Theatre) Sozanský staged performances at the Karlín Musical Theatre which had been badly damaged by the flood. Again Beckett, a major inspiration, played a significant role. Photographs from the performances together with a documentary DVD, OUTCASTS, are included in the Vision Centre exhibition.
Cloudburst – A Prague Catastrophe will be officially launched by the Czech Ambassador to Ireland, Josef Havlas and Cork City Arts Officer Liz Meaney at 6pm on 5th September 2006. Opening to the public on Wednesday 6th September, it will run until 30th September 2006.
This exhibition has been supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic and Municipality of Prague.
| | | For Further Information
Contact: The Cork Vision Centre
Tel: 353-21-4279925
| | Email: visioncentre@eircom.net | | |  | | |
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| CLOUDBURST – A PRAGUE CATASTROPHE
THE ARTIST
JIŘÍ SOZANSKÝ
Born 27 June 1946 in Prague
1960-1963 - apprenticed as bricklayer
1963-1967 - worked as bricklayer
1967-1973 - student at the Prague Arts Academy
(class of Professor František Jiroudek)
1973–2006 - painter, graphic artist, sculptor, organizer of installations and
environments, author of documentaries
Jiří Sozanský's art is fully at one with his time. He made his entry as artist in the mid-1970s, in a period of culminating normalization and repression of artists' freedom. From the very beginning his art has been part and parcel of his rejection of all forms of violence, arbitrariness and ideological dictatorship, which encroaches on human rights and human dignity.
A non-conformist artist, he is known for his clear-cut ideas and attitudes, which he vents in large multi-media projects, always connected with a specific place. Sozanský's activities in unusual places enlivened the Czech arts scene in the 1970s. He addressed the "normalizing" society, regardless of considerable personal hazards.
Sozanský is interested in human beings in extreme situations, in their inner mood and their reaction to other humans. His paintings, drawings, sculptures, objects, installations, environments and perfomances invariably respond to a specific milieu and social situation as an urgent warning. Such was the essence of his several activities at the Teezín Memorial, in Most, in Vysočany, at the Trade-Fair Palace.
Their logical continuation were sundry projects carried out after 1990 - at the Valdice prison, in the former Jesuit church in Litoměřice, several activities related to the war suffering of the inhabitants of Sarajevo, presented in both Bohemia and Bosnia and Hercegovina.
Without a shadow of doubt Sozanský takes most seriously his role of an artist, for whom art is a personal statement about the surrounding world. This is why he returns again and again in his art to topical, but not exactly popular subjects, in order to clearly describe the condition and development trends of our civilization.
In 1988 Jiří Sozanský obtained a scholarship from the Jackson-Pollock Krasner Foundation New York and in 1995 a grant from the Open Society Fund Prague. To this day he held some fifty independent exhibitions and participated in more than a hundred group exhibitions at home and abroad.
His works are in many public and private art collections in both the Czech Republic and a number of foreign countries.
CLOUDBURST – A PRAGUE CATASTROPHE is curated by Professor Jiří T.Kotalík.
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