The Man in the Background 2012–2015 looks back at the era into which the Czech-French painter Marta Morice (*1971) delved in order to express, in comic-book form, the story of her great uncle Miroslav Polreich, who had been a Czechoslovak diplomat and intelligence agent in the United States during the Cold War. Polreich’s diplomatic strategy helped make possible the Glassboro Summit, an
important meeting held in New Jersey in 1967 between the heads of government of the United States and the Soviet Union – President Lyndon B. Johnson and Premier Alexei Kosygin. The conference
led to improved Soviet-American relations during the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War. Working with her great-uncle’s memoirs and writings, period photographs and her own research done in collaboration with researcher Jiří Skotal, Morice put together the graphic novel Secret Agent, published by Argo in 2017. The exhibition The Man in the Background 2012–2015 is divided into six chapters to reflect the book’s storyline: Mission Days, Glassboro Days, Green Days, Spy Days, Black Days and Return Days. Each section presents originals from the graphic novel, accompanied by more recent charcoal drawings. In this way, the exhibition gives visitors an authentic and intimate look at Morice’s literary-visual work while presenting a strong personal story set against the backdrop of ‘great’ events in world history. The second part of the exhibition consists of a sampling of Morice’s fine art production, specifically several large-format watercolours from her cycle Partner Panther / Femme – Animal, inspired by the ideas of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and made at the same time as Secret Agent. Viewers are thus confronted with two seemingly unrelated artistic approaches that in actuality reflect subconscious connections and cross-pollination. The exhibition also includes a small sampling of what
Morice is working on today, as represented by the conceptual object Recursion and the site-specific installation Veil.

Marta Morice (*1971) hails from Pohled near Havlíčkův Brod but has long resided in the French town of Lorient. She is a graduate of Brno University of Technology’s Faculty of Fine Arts, where she studied
figure painting with Jiří Načeradský. Her main focus is on watercolours, but she also works with the media of painting, drawing, photography and video art. Since 2008, she has exhibited alternatingly in
both France and the Czech Republic. Her works can be found in private collections in the Czech Republic and abroad.