Art in the City

This year's exhibition also includes Jiří David's Key Sculpture, which Vodafone offered to the city. The opening takes place, as is now the tradition, on náměstí Přemysla Otakara II on 7 June 2011 at 19:00, again with Jakub Šafr and the Avalon Swing Trio. It will be held beneath Michal Trpák's sculpture titled Stage of Fascination — a group of lamps in love, which also evokes intertwined figures embracing, or the structure of DNA. In the opposite corner of the square, Lukáš Rais brings metal to life, weaving and bending it as if it were a flexible rope. Is it a symbol of the tangle of the mind, or of the path a person walks, a troublesome puzzle, or just a game with material and curve? Perhaps that is why the artist left the object untitled, so that each viewer can find their own story in it. From Rais's sculpture it is only a short walk to the Black Tower, on which Michal Trpák's monumental golden fly has settled, titled “What is happiness?” — a reflection on what everyone longs for, inspired by a poem by Adolf Hejduk and by the insect itself.

A fly: so small, useless and irritating, and yet beautiful when you can look at it under a microscope. It is a fascinating biological machine that our eyes cannot take in in detail. Perhaps that is why it has been enlarged, so that the details can be made out and so that we can weigh up our own size against a creature blown up to superhuman scale. Just as we weigh up happiness — so fragile, seemingly complicated, and yet sometimes so easy, when a person is able to notice small things. Another of the artists, Tomáš Medek, brings Piaristické náměstí to life with his steel structure, playing with the shapes of a mandarin and a banana. Medek lets the outer and inner structures of the whole form flow into one another. Placed, symbolically enough, where the regular markets are held, the group playfully invites dialogue between the place and the market traders themselves. On the embankment of the Malše, by the entrance to the Bishop's Garden, Jakub Flejšar's pensive sculpture “Seated” sits on a bench. The steel figure, breaking up into segments, invites you to sit down beside it and reflect… From the bench you can watch another story on the other side of the river, made by Michal Gabriel. His sculpture “Rider”, galloping across the island together with red horses, carries the viewer into another reality and opens new horizons, for the place and for the viewer's mind alike.

Michal Trpák
sculptor and founder of the exhibition