Mysterious Distances (Symbolism and Art in the Bohemian Lands, 1880-1914). In his books, Otto M. Urban was the first person to define Czech Symbolism in the fine arts as a distinct phenomenon acting in a proclamatory fashion as part of the broader European artistic stream. Thanks to his insight, Czech art found its place within the natural context of European culture. The exhibition and the book Mysterious Distances juxtaposes renowned artists such as Mucha, Kupka, Pirner, Knüpfer, Schwaiger, Svabinsky, Bilek, Saloun, Zrzavy, Staeger and Teschner with many lesser known or newly discovered figures. The book includes an anthology of critical texts of the time and essays devoted to Symbolism in literature, theatre and applied art.

Mysterious Distances. Symbolism and Art in the Bohemian Lands, 1880–1914

Otto M. Urban

Arbor Vitae

Born from a bizarre, fin-de-siècle amalgam of dandyism, occultism and Symbolism, Decadence moved the Romantic imagination firmly indoors, into a morbid, mauve-hued interior with Redon on the walls and Poe on the bookshelves. Czech art was well suited to express the Decadent temperament, and In Morbid Colours reveals, for the first time, the incredible cornucopia of fantastical, proto-Surrealist art produced under this rubric between 1880 and 1914. Full of superb color illustrations, it details the work of artists such as Frantisek Bilek, Karel Hlavácek, Frantisek Kavan, Benes Knüpfer, Gabriel Max, Alfons Mucha, Max Pirner, Jan Preisler, Jakub Schikaneder, Hanus Schwaiger, Max Svabinsky and Josef Váchal, as well as artists with ties to Czech art such as Alfred Kubin, August Brömse and Richard Teschner. All of these artists constitute a hitherto-undiscovered world unto themselves, and each is embellished here with superbly-researched commentary and excerpts from contemporaneous Decadent literature.

Decadence: In Morbid Colours- Art and the Idea of Decadence in the Bohemian Lands 1880-1914

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Artefakt/Arbor Vitae

This catalogue documents an exhibition in Prague by English duo Jake and Dinos Chapman (born 1966 and 1962) and serves as a retrospective of the brothers' controversial oeuvre.

Jake & Dinos Chapman: The Blind Leading The Blind (GALERIE RUDOLFI)

jake-chapman

árka Komedová

Individual Artists

Galerie Rudolfinum

Joel-Peter Witkin: Vanitas offers a concise survey of one of the most controversial photographers alive. Since the late 1970s, Witkin’s black-and-white portraits and still-lifes of hermaphrodites, body parts, severed heads, mutilations and similar themes have inevitably provided shock fodder to the religious right, while seeming to evoke an easy relationship to ideas of decadence and morbidity. For Witkin, the goal is simple: “I wanted my photographs to be as powerful as the last thing a person sees or remembers before death.” Witkin’s photographs offer up examples of life’s extremities as unblinking confrontations with mortality, whose power derives not merely from their content but from the keen compositional instincts governing that content. Witkin’s gift for still life and his use of religious motifs such as crucifixion and sainthood have been nourished by his appreciation of the likes of Francisco Goya, Odilon Redon and Hieronymus Bosch, whose examples he has translated for the concerns of the present. Witkin’s photographs have made a colossal impact upon contemporary culture, influencing artists such as the Chapman Brothers and Erwin Olaf, musicians such as Diamanda Galás and Trent Reznor, and the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen, among many others. Vanitas provides a cross-section of the artist’s work from the 1970s to the present. In addition to photographs, it includes many lesser-known drawings and paintings, as well as Witkin’s most recent, previously unpublished photographs. A bilingual (English/Czech) text by the art historian Otto M. Urban summarizes the development of Witkin’s life and work. Joel-Peter Witkin was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1939, and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Joel-Peter Witkin: Vanitas (ARBOR VITAE)

The photographs of David LaChapelle (born 1963) are among the most instantly recognizable images in contemporary photography. His über-pop color portraits of celebrities such as Cameron Diaz, Marilyn Manson and Kanye West (whom he has portrayed, respectively, as King Kong, a crossing guard and Black Jesus) have propelled his work outside the closed society of galleries and museums into a wider public arena. Thus Spoke LaChapelle is the first retrospective of the artist’s work to include photographs from the mid–1980s up to the present, plus a range of work that has never previously appeared. More than an exhibition catalogue, this book presents the culmination of LaChapelle’s artistic activity to date: a world in which religious iconography comes in pink latex trappings and a new surrealism explodes in the conjunction of flaming pianos, giant hamburgers, orally fixated Triceratops and Day-Glo disaster sites.

Thus Spoke LaChapelle (ARBOR VITAE)

Photography & Video