This exhibition features more than 200 paintings from the collections of the Hradec Králové Gallery of Modern Art as it celebrates its 70th anniversary. The works on display range from the late 18th century to the present day. The exhibition explores how the canon of Czech (and Czechoslovak) art history chimes with the tastes of contemporary audiences. In pursuit of this aim, the curatorial selection consciously brings together works by well-known painters with pictures by less celebrated, half-forgotten, provincial and even entirely anonymous artists. Unlike run-of-the-mill gallery projects, which naturally involve works that have been culled and critiqued by generations of art historians and critics, here we present visitors with a broad palette of artistic and technical quality that more faithfully reflects the reality of human creativity and gallery collections.

Olbram Pavlíček’s exhibition KORPSEPUNX: Stress Prosthetics at the White Cube of Hradec Králové’s Gallery of Modern Art presents the artist’s latest sculptures, prints, and drawings in which he subversively imitates the design of industrially manufactured products and, through their deconstruction, uncovers the ways in which they influence the lives of their users. Pavlíček subjects devices, symbols, and tools that we know from our everyday lives to aesthetic analysis, showing how their comfortable ergonomics, mathematically precise personalization, or clever visual design hide uncompromising demands. Often, they transform human integrity itself, for living as we do in a technological, consumption-defined environment, we have no control over “our” actions. Instead, we must adapt to the design-determined interfaces of non-human objects. Pavlíček has been exploring this subject in his long-term exhibition series KORPSEPUNX, in which he uses a variety of artistic formats to explore the effects that the complex systems of contemporary societal power have on the individual.

The Gallery of Modern Art presents recent works by visual artist Jana Bernartová (*1983), on display in the gallery’s Black Box exhibition space. The artist’s large-format embroidery Raster ZERO #heroine II (2020–2021) from the series Parametric Digital Structure is presented within the context of works by printmaker Ivan Chatrný (1928–1983) and multimedia artist Milan Guštar (*1963) from the gallery’s collections: Guštar’s audiovisual installation Abacus from 2002–2013 and Chatrný’s Orchestral Composition screenprints from the late 1960s. Both these artists have been of fundamental importance for Bernartová at various stages in her career. While Chatrný’s prints represented a key source of inspi-ration for her reflections on structure during her student days, for Bernartová as an artist with a back-ground in the latest technologies, Guštar’s work is fascinating mainly for how it touches on a broad range of artistic media.

Statues and Statuettes: Josef Václav Škoda presents a cross-section of Josef Škoda’s small-scale sculptural works from the 1920s to the 1940s. It includes works made from a variety of materials such as stone, bronze, pewter, wood, terracotta, limestone, or plaster, alongside several of his drawings. The exhibition follows on the recent showing of Traces of Bronze and Stone: Josef Václav Škoda at GMU’s Vladimír Preclík Gallery, which explored Škoda’s important works for public space in the town of Hradec Králové and its environs. This latest exhibition at GMU features an intervention in the form of a painting by Bohumil Kubišta (Portrait of Václav Rejchl, 1908) and a sculpture by Karel Nepraš (The Confluence of the Elbe and the Vltava As a Grade-Separated Junction, 2000–2001), which will be installed in the gallery’s lobby until 9 June 2024.