British artist Henry Moore (1898–1986) is considered a leading representative of modern sculpture whose work influenced individual artists as well as entire stylistic tendencies. Working with a detailed chronology, the exhibition explores the diplomatic framework and other mechanisms involved in the presentation and reception of Moore’s art during the Cold War. Mainly, however, it looks at his work’s influence on Czechoslovak sculpture in the second half of the 20th century.

The exhibition Puppets & Chairs at the gallery’s White Cube is an imaginative stroll through a puppeteer’s studio. Gallery visitors can familiarise themselves with various chapters in the careers of partners in life and art Věra and František Vítek, see their original and joint works, and listen to the ticking, rattling, and clinking of playing and non-playing mechanisms. On display are examples of theatre objects and props, presented in a visually captivating space filled with drawings, and a collection of old chairs.

Tears for Fears is a British synthpop band founded in the 1980s. Its name was inspired by so-called primal therapy, developed by the American psychologist Arthur Janov. This form of therapy is founded on an exploration of childhood traumas, which may be the source of problems that last into adulthood. “Tears for fears” thus refers to the healing power of crying as a way of overcoming fear or anxiety. The concept of coming to terms with (environmental) trauma by appropriating pop songs forms an important aspect of the life of multimedia artist Juliana Höschlová and has been a part of her work for several years. An important source of inspiration for this exhibition is the motif of water in the form of a creek near the artist’s home. With the progressive impact of climate change, however, the creek’s visual form and sound have changed, thus confronting us with a number of questions. How to come to terms with the disappearance of something over which we have no control? How to mourn so that we do not succumb to passive resignation but instead find the strength to follow new paths? Can we reconcile ourselves with the fact that the world as we knew it no longer exists and that, in some places, life is becoming impossible?

The use of cultural tools to criticise consumerism is as old as consumerism itself. Artistic critiques of capitalism date back to Germany’s socially engaged expressionism of the 1920s and 1930s known as New Objectivity. The progressive representatives of New Objectivity engaged in their first critiques of consumerism at a time of constant economic crisis and economic downturns, which eventually proved fatal to the Weimar Republic. New Objectivity was similarly adopted by Czechoslovak avant-garde artists with close ties to German culture, including the painters Adolf Hoffmeister, Antonín Pelc and Otakar Mrkvička. Sharp criticism of consumerism can also be found in the early slapstick films of Charlie Chaplin and, in Czechoslovakia, in the theatrical revues and film comedies of Voskovec and Werich and in other early films that, paradoxically, were a product of consumer culture. In the United States during the McCarthy era, pop art focused on the widespread consumerism that had sprung from the post-war economic boom, when the increased purchasing power of the middle and working classes resulted in increased consumption. Critiques of consumerism were of course present in all European social and artistic movements of the 1960s, including Viennese Actionism and Arte Povera, or the French New Wave and Italian neorealism in cinema.

Cabinet of Curiosities, which is part of the exhibition How to Collect Art: the Karel Tutsch Story, introduces the visitor to the beginnings of Karel Tutsch’s collecting through the first section of ex libris – a collection of small purpose prints, the logical continuation of which was the expansion of interest in free graphic art. The Cabinet of Curiosities will gradually introduce individual artists and their works on paper, which are an indispensable part of the collection.

One of the ways in which members of modern society express themselves is by collecting fine art. The cosmos of their burgeoning collection conveys their passions, pursuits, and opinions on what is good, high-quality, meaningful and beautiful. We can think of collection-building as an open and dynamic process with an unknown endpoint, because as the collection grows, so does the collector’s knowledge and experience, and the future of the collection is slowly reshaped.

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.

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.