LET YOURSELF BE GUIDED (AND BEGUILED) BY ART IN 2025

In 2025, the Gallery of the Central Bohemian Region in Kutná Hora will present works by several important representatives of 20th- and 21st-century Czech art. The main exhibition of the spring season will be Horn of Cape, featuring the work of three artists – Veronika Šrek Bromová, Markéta Othová and Kateřina Vincourová. In the autumn, GASK will present a cross-section of works by the twelve members of the loose association of artists known as 12/15 Better Late Than Never…, who created art in the second half of Normalisation, when cultural life in Czechoslovakia was suppressed. Also in the autumn, GASK will hold an exhibition to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of the artist Dalibor Chatrný and will celebrate the 90th birthday of printmaker Alena Kučerová. In 2025, Kutná Hora marks the 30th anniversary of its inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List, and GASK will join the city-wide celebration with three projects: the A Day of Sound music festival, a new project by Kateřina Šedá aimed at bringing together urban communities and Michael Bielický and Kamila B. Richter’s new media intervention in public space titled VORTEXT. The gallery is also planning a new venture in the gallery gardens – a bistro that will open in the spring. On this occasion, Jiří Příhoda’s monumental Carbol will be unveiled in GASK’s open-air gallery.

The exhibition Horn of Cape presents the work of three artists – Veronika Šrek Bromová, Markéta Othová and Kateřina Vincourová – from the first generation of distinctive female artists who emerged onto the Czech art scene in the 1990s through their experimentations with new media as well as new materials such as plastic, which had been previously overlooked in this country. At the same time, these artists introduced strong feminine themes onto the contemporary art scene. At GASK, the artists will present a unique project focussed on the impact that new technologies have on the anthropological evolution of people and society. ‘Through the work of three artists who contributed to past and present transformations, the exhibition contrasts important artistic stimuli that shaped contemporary visuality thirty years ago with the new visual possibilities of the present day’, says curator Adriana Primusová, a 2024 nominee for the Czech Academy of Visual Arts’s Curator of the Year award. The exhibition at GASK runs from 13 April to 28 September 2025.

GASK’s autumn season opens with the exhibition 12/15 Better…, which will present works by the most significant group of artists from the 1970s and 1980s, 12/15 Better Late Than Never… The group’s members created their seminal works at a time when exhibition activities were strictly controlled and institutionalised by the communist regime and when international contacts were curtailed or nearly impossible. ‘Although the group’s members created very different works of art, their unifying element was a critical reflection of life in the oppressive Normalisation-era regimem coupled with a determination to defend freedom of creative expression’, says Richard Drury, curator of the exhibition for GASK. Featuring works by Jiří Sopek, Michael Rittstein, Václav Bláha, Jiří Načeradský, Kurt Gebauer, Tomáš Šveda, Ivan Kafka, Jiří Beránek, Petr Pavlík, Ivan Ouhel, Vladimír Novák and Jaroslav E. Dvořák, the exhibition will look at the group’s artistic development – or rather, that of its members – over the course of forty years.