The concept of the historically focused collection exhibition How to Collect Art: the Karel Tutsch Story will be expanded by a series of exhibitions of the youngest generation of artists, current students or graduates from art school studios. In this way, the curators will revive Tutsch’s basic strategy of discovering and presenting the works of previously unknown artists in a new context. Gallery Na bidýlku II will thus become a laboratory for new approaches to the traditional medium of painting and installation, whose transformations Tutsch has followed and supported for several decades.
The art of Jan Wilda is characterized by diversity, experimentation and playfulness. Wilda works with media such as drawing, collage, installations and ceramics. He expands on and disrupts traditional crafts techniques, using them in his own unconventional manner. Besides serving a decorative function, these visual forms and techniques are also an integral part of his artistic concept. Wilda’s works range from the grotesque to the serious, but he does not hesitate to also work with digital technologies or tools – for instance, he uses a computer to draw, and he records his performative wanderings using a camera.
In his works, Wilda repeatedly makes use of motifs from fairy tales, myths and folk tales. He is nevertheless interested in more than a mere retelling of familiar narratives; he seeks to deconstruct and update them. His works contain archetypal elements such as his own designs for tarot cards or the folk narratives contained in the recordings of his travels through his native countryside. Throughout it all, his approach is characterized by a refined sense for metaphor and visual shorthand.
At the GMU exhibition, Wilda introduces us to a landscape resembling the ruins of a long-forgotten world. Towers grow out of clay – the oldest building material, a bearer of memory, a reminder of the human body. Thus Rusts a Story Just Before the End takes us into a fantastic story about the state of the world today, depicted in the form of an original installation and video essays.
At first glance, the installation looks like a map of a city, but upon a closer look it resembles a ritual landscape. The arrangement of clay towers in the exhibition space creates an original topography representing both a reconstruction and an omen – something like a city after a fire. The towers are not just an architectural element, but a symbol for intervention from above. Their unsettlingly familiar shapes remind us of totem poles. Are they relicts of something that has burnt down, or are they artefacts of a future that has not yet happened?
The exhibition is accompanied by Wilda’s pseudo-occult story captured on camera. In the story, he makes humorous and absurd use of symbols from magic, rituals and fairy tales, with the story ending in an unexpected twist. Any one of us can become an adventurer not quite ready to save the world, and the central motif of a black egg may represent chaos as well as renewal. Wilda’s work challenges viewers to consider whether death is truly the end or a new beginning.
