Magdalena Jetelová’s installation, prepared especially for the National Gallery in Prague, transforms the Small Hall of the Trade Fair Palace into an extended field providing insight into the artist’s thinking and working. The Small Hall becomes an art site that can be reflexted from multiple sides. This installation entitled Touch of Time has been concieved as a dialogue with the architecture of the Trade Fair Palace and at the same time as a devastated landscape creating sense of instability and fragility of the global social situation, inspiring the audience to aks further questions: What is the leading power in this world? How should one react when the observed landscape no longer appears idyllic? The landscape is a carrier of history which invisibly written on its surface. One who walks through this landscape experiences collective memory. The installation extends into the adjacent exhibition space in mezanin of the Trade Fair Palace where the audience has the unique opportunity to see Jetelova's selection of relevant works since 1980's.

Magdalena Jetelová began creating monumental sculptures in early 1980's as a means of expressing contextuality. Jetelová was inspired by movements like, for example, Arte povera, while studying in Italy, and her contemporaries artists such as Richard Deacon of New British Sculpture and James Coleman with whom she studied. In Czechoslovakia, she exhibited her work with other artists at a major event called The Lesser Town’s Courtyards. She has exhbited in Tate London, Riverside Studios London, MoMA New York, Documenta 8 or Sydney Biennial.

Curator: Milena Kalinovska
Catalogue Magdalena Jetelová – Touch of Time with contributions by: Susanne Altmann, Milena Kalinovská, Marie Klimešová, Peter Noever, Jitka Šosová, Marius Winzeler

National Gallery in Prague - Faire Trade Palace