Exhibition Jindřich Chalupecký Award 2019

In our final project for the Jindřich Chalupecký Award, we decided to donate a series of frescoes to six organizations whose mission we consider socially valuable and necessary. These were mostly non-profit organizations addressing the problems of specific communities or social groups through fieldwork and daily contact with clients. A key element of their functioning is slow, systematic work directed toward long-term, functional care for both individuals and communities.

A fresco is, by analogy, a form of care for a specific place—something that can influence it positively in the long run. Comunite Fresca donates frescoes to organizations in an effort to support them in the way we, as painters, are able to provide.

At the exhibition in the Moravian Gallery, the donated frescoes were reflected through the gifts we received back from the institutions—jars of honey, drawings, a glass hand with a butterfly, a clock that runs slow, pickles. We placed them into an architecture we designed for this purpose and for further painting within the exhibition. The architecture drew from the spatial possibilities of the assigned room and our favorite architectural elements such as a patio, arches, views, a tower, and different kinds of aging materials. The construction was covered with frescoes, charred wood, old bricks, and rusty corrugated metal.

Unlike our usual practice—where we seek to harmonize with a given environment, preserve its specificity, and enrich it—here we were in the opposite situation. The proposed architecture was created specifically for frescoes, which paradoxically made painting onto it all the more difficult. In the end, we tried to evoke the atmosphere of dusk in a studio flat on a rock above the sea in unspecified Mediterranean country.

Curators: Barbora Ciprová, Karina Kottová
Photos: Tomáš Souček