Art in the City

The sculptures are by people from across the generations, from fresh graduates of the art schools to the resounding names of established, well-known artists. The exhibition was born in 2007, when, as a diploma student at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, I showed my final work, Humanoids, on Lannova třída in Č. Budějovice. The group stood there all summer and two years later it returned to the same place permanently. That installation was the inspiration for the birth of a sculpture exhibition in the streets of the city.

The thread linking this year's exhibition is the city, the monumentality of the objects and the subject of the figure — animal, human or from the realm of fantasy. All the objects have entered the city together, and the city is their gallery, their backdrop and their wider context. Sculptures in the city are not installed as they would be in a gallery. Compared with a conventional gallery, the space of a city is very particular.

In galleries, thanks to their clean spaces, practically anything can be installed without fear of losing its expression, its visual meaning, the identity of the work itself or the idea behind the whole installation.

In the city, however, an artist enters a space rich in colour, shape and story, and full of stimulus and movement as well. Installing in the streets is therefore a challenge with many possibilities for placing a work and drawing it into dialogue with a real, living space. Each sculpture thus finds a gallery of its own in the place where it stands, and the story of the sculpture joins the story of the place.

These days a sculpture has to look for its place and for its way to the viewer. Unlike in the past, when sculptural objects were inseparably tied to newly built buildings and public space — to the streets of cities — people's awareness of that link between sculpture and the space we live in is slowly fading, and sculptures have to find their place by themselves.

I am therefore very glad that, despite all the obstacles, we managed to bring about the seventh edition of Art in the City, an exhibition that sets out to show, in these hurried and visually fragmented times, the potential of sculptures to give a place another dimension. To give it a story and a face. Singularity, originality, a soul — and to bring sculpture back from the gallery into the living space of the city.

I wish you a fine time with the sculptures in the city.

Michal Trpák
sculptor and founder of the exhibition