Publication details
Břetislav Malý / Kde končí řeka a začíná moře?
| Title in English | Břetislav Malý / Where does the river end and the sea begin? |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Exposition |
| Citation | |
| Description | Břetislav Malý is an artist with a distinctly analytical foundation, whose painterly explorations are driven by an effort to understand what painting actually is, what principles and rules make a painting and what its possibilities and limits are in relation to our perception. His questioning of the basic elements of painting and their primary functions opens up new possibilities for constructing an image in which established categories begin to collapse - the image suddenly takes on the qualities of an object, and sometimes even of architecture or drawing, without, however, losing the character of the painting. For the exhibition at Etcetera Gallery, the problem of line in the painting became a defining issue. Little radically reduced the surface of the painting to the format of a line in order to observe what happens when the painting itself, whose elementary basis is the surface, is conceived as a line, and conversely, at what point the line becomes a surface. The monochromatic line-paintings made of layered canvas and heavy iron frames not only acquire a spatial character, but also resemble a monumentalized drawing in their surface and frayed edges. By thematising the line in relation to the surface, Břetislav Malý has placed himself alongside artists such as Johannes Itten, Paul Klee and Vasily Kandinsky, whose poetic metaphor gave the exhibition its title. |