SMETANA´S CREATIVE LITOMYŠL 2024
Since 2019, the Litomyšl Municipal Gallery has been organising the summer festival Smetana’s Creative Litomyšl. Similarly to the past nineteen years, visitors to the Litomyšl festival will also be able to see over two dozen exhibition projects this year.
The central exhibition of the 20th anniversary year of Smetana’s Art Litomyšl is a generously conceived open-air show of sculptures by the sculptor Čestmír Suška, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. His ten monumental sculptures were placed in the public space of the city with the intention of organically blending the individual aesthetics of the metal solitaires with the distinctive atmosphere of the selected locations.
Suška’s richly shaped sculptures stand in contrast to the intimately tuned artworks of one of our most important artists of the second half of the 20th century. century of Alena Kučerová. Her exhibition entitled Point, Image, Landscape… can be visited at the Miroslav Kubík Gallery.
Contemporary art is also the focus of the Smetana Art Litomyšl exhibition DVA / Renata Edlmanová / Jasan Zoubek (White Gallery), project A Heap of Stones (Lubná) or a photography exhibition AllegroForteby Štěpánky Stein and Venda Mlejnská. The captivating large-format images depict important Czech classical music performers (e.g. conductor Jakub Hrůša, prima ballerina Daria Klimentová or flutist Jana Semerádová) and their formal conception disrupts our usual ideas about the serious world of classical music.
Similarly to the music festival, some of the art projects also reflect this year’s “Bedrich Smetana´s theme”. The spirit of the time in which Smetana lived and worked is presented in an exhibition at the Litomyšl Municipal Gallery entitled Stanislav Sucharda. Emotions of a nation. Two new sculptures also celebrate Bedrich Smetana´s anniversary. The first one is called The Way of Life and its author is sculptor Rudolf Burda, whose works were presented last year in the Chateau Brewery. In the spirit of his work, R. Burda created a sculpture for Litomyšl made of highly polished stainless steel material. We would search in vain for the composer’s person expressed in a more classical sculptural conception in Burd’s statue. The Way of Life is rather an expression of the composer’s lifelong love for music and the emotions it awakens in us.
The author of the second of the “cream monuments”, called Auriossa, is sculptor and designer Michal Cimala. His free work is characterized primarily by a reflection of the present, which is reflected in a very distinctive figurative sculpture. In the case of the statue for Litomyšl, however, the author gave up the figure because he did not necessarily need to name the unknown. He was working with the notorious life story of a famous composer. Instead of being plausible, however, he has resorted to deconstructing it, borrowing only one of its most important attributes – the composer’s gradual loss of hearing – from the narrative we know from textbooks and scholarly texts. He was inspired by the book Bedřich Smetana – Physical Personality and Deafness by the Czech anthropologist Emanuel Vlček, specifically the drawings of ear bones contained therein.
In addition to the exhibition of works by Stanislav Sucharda in the U Rytířů house, the festival also features exhibitions devoted to older art in the Zdeněk Sklenář Gallery (František Kupka – Known Unknown), in the Kroupa Gallery (Woman as Muse in Modern Art) and in Portmoneu – Josef Váchal Museum, where erotic photographs, bibliophilia and ex-libris from the early 20th century are on display. century (exhibition When Men Blush).
After a two-year break caused by reconstruction, the castle in Litomyšl returns City Picture Gallery. At the exhibition entitled City Gallery, the City Gallery Litomyšl will present works from its collection as well as large-format paintings Ecce Homo by artist Daniel Pešta, which was exhibited at the Venice Biennale.
Other activities of Smetana Litomysl include exhibitions MenART – on the way in the house of the Knights, TRIUMPHONY – Czech glass of five centuries in the Gallery at Milovská huti, Veronika Bílková/ Plein Air 2 in Pakosta Gallery, Glass Anion& Jiří Pačinekat the Castle Brewery, Martin Patřičný in Dudycha Gallery, Antonín Kroča: landscape with flowers, flowers for a woman in the U Fortny Gallery or Texts, scores, records at the Chateau Brewery.
All the events of the twentieth edition of Smetana’s Art Litomysl are summarized on the website www.vytvarnalitomysl.czand in the programme booklet, which is available at the info points of the music festival and at the Information Centre.
The project Smetana’s Art Litomyšl will take place in 2024 thanks to the kind financial support of Veronika and Libor Winkler, the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, the Pardubice Region and the town of Litomyšl.
