The František Skála exhibition will focus on the artist’s work since 2004. Skála seeks to provide a complex experience for the visitor within the author’s architectural and exhibition concept in the Waldstein Riding School Picture Gallery. The installation will be fully integrated with the venue’s architecture and lighting and will include various exhibition pavilions or solitary monumental works, light installations and works done specifically for the site. The exhibition may be viewed as several thematic exhibitions, each seemingly challenging its predecessor and the established view of Skála’s work. The full picture, however, will reveal a hidden order, a worldview, a point of artistic interest and examination, which the artist wishes to express through his work. The exhibition’s underlying principle will be an assemblage of artistic materials in several pavilions designed by the artist, “museums within a museum”. Skála will use the exhibition vocabulary to initiate different kinds and levels of dialogue between viewer and artwork. The display’s unifying element will be light, which Skála examines and uses in all its forms. On a practical level, the light makes it possible to see the exhibits, but it is also a tool for understanding them; it can shine through materials and “enlighten” the viewer. Most of the space will be illuminated with artificial light, sometimes imitating natural sunshine. In some cases, the viewer will enter a space illuminated by natural sunlight coming in through the gallery’s non-blacked out windows onto the Waldstein Garden.

Curator: Tomas Pospiszyl
Architect: Šimon Caban

National Gallery in Prague - Waldstein Riding School