Jiri Kornatovsky

HIC ET NUNC

Areacreativa42 is pleased to announce the inauguration of the HIC ET NUNC exhibition on Saturday 11 March 2017 at 5 pm at Casa Toesca. The project is part of the artist residency program organized by Areacreativa42 between January 2016 and April 2017. The intent of the association is to make available to the territory the network of knowledge in the field of art, developed in these years, to enable experiences to be shared for the development of the surrounding area.

In this specific case the artist Jiri Kornatovsky and the curator Helena Fenclova bring the experience already achieved in Marseille on the occasion of the Capital City of European culture and in other exhibitions.

For the occasion, workshops and workshops for children and adults will be organized that will have the artist’s work as a starting point. In the previous residency experiences at Casa Toesca the young guests had the task of opening a dialogue with the territory by “immersing themselves” in its own places, in this case Kornatovsky managed to share a more deeply essential experience and disconnected from any localistic aspect .

In particular, we want to deepen the theme of the language of art, product of individuality, but at the same time universal signifier.

The archetype and its relationship with individual consciousness, a subject deeply investigated by the artist during his career, is a recurring theme in the history of art and philosophy.

Wanting to lay the foundations for an experiment that can be extended to other future projects, it was decided to involve Claudio Demarco, a musician, and Helena Fenklova, curator of the Czech Republic who has already worked with Jiri Kornatovsky and who actively participates in promoted projects from the European Community.

The possibility of interaction between art and music in relation to Helena Fenclova’s analyzes will open up an intercultural dialogue and broaden our planning and relational horizons.

The drawings on large cartoons, stretch after stretch, create a gestural rhythm that merges with the vital rhythm of music: a rhythm that marks a time that is no longer just physical, but also psychological, perceptive and experiential. The goal is to integrate the artistic gesture with the musical one and to propose it to the public both live, with a concert in conjunction with the exhibition of the works, and subsequently recorded.

JIRI KORNATOVSKI (1952 Czech Republic)

 Jiri Kornatovsky was born in Plasy, a village with an abandoned Cistercian monastery where Jiri spent most of his days up to the age of 21. After graduating from the technical school in Pilsen, he attended first the Vaclav Hollar art school and then the monumental painting courses at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

At the end of the 1980s he published a series of spiritual posters and in 1991 he was co-founder of the Hermit Foundation in the Cistercian monastery of Plasy. From 1992 he traveled to the studios and artist residences in the Carmelite monastery of Sejny, in Poland, Florence, New York and Boston and in Germany. Between 1998 and 1999 he founded his personal Hermit gallery in Prague. He is a professor at Charles University in Prague and in the design faculty of West Bohemia University in Pilsen, also holds lessons in foreign universities such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Sorbonne in Paris. From an artistic point of view, his large black and white drawings of plastic objects and the huge archetypal charcoal drawings that are completely extraneous to Czech art, were immediately noticed and appreciated in the first appearances of the 80s. These designs are characterized by the careful execution and use in an abstract and certainly meditative key of symbols deriving from natural forms. The question of meditation, central to Jiri’s artistic discourse, can in fact be better understood by looking for the key to reading his works in the treatise of Saint Augustine on reflection on the world of ideas and sensory realities.

More than 200 group exhibitions have seen Jiri Kornatovski’s works in the Czech Republic and abroad.

Awards

• 1994 Mayor of Kraków Award, Graphic Art Triennial, Kraków, Poland

• 2008 Laureate of the Franz Kafka Prague circle Award

 

Presence in private and public collections in the Czech Republic and abroad:

• National Gallery of Art, Washington, USA

• National Gallery in Prague, Czech Republic

• Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia

• Museum Kampa, Meda Mládková collection, Prague, Czech Republic

• GASK – the Gallery of the Central Bohemian Region, Kutná hora, Czech Republic

• West Bohemian Gallery, Pilsen, Czech Republic

• Aleš South Bohemian Gallery, Hluboká nad Vltavou, Czech Republic

• Klatovy / Klenová Gallery, Czech Republic

• Gallery of Modern Art Roudnice nad Labem, Czech Republic

• Regional Gallery Karl