The Cabinet of Curiosities section of the exhibition How to Collect Art: The Karel Tutsch Story introduces visitors to Karel Tutsch’s early collecting activities through a set of ex libris – a collection of small-scale applied graphic art. From here, Tutsch’s interests logically expanded to include fine art prints. Over time, the Cabinet of Curiosities will present various artists and their works on paper that form an indispensable part of the collection.
Thanks to his absurd sense of sarcasm, the painter, printmaker, long-time teacher and leading representative of the New Figuration of the 1960s Jiří Načeradský is among other things associated with the “Czech Grotesque”. Already as a student, he was creating works characterised by a gestural rawness and expressiveness, and yet each seemingly random brushstroke hides a conscious and well-considered strategy. For Načeradský, painting and drawing was a game that underwent several quite radical transformations over the years: “At each age, a person thinks differently, lives differently, and so he should paint differently as well…, even if he’s still the same person. I don’t want to get to know myself, I want to surprise myself – at least a little… .” After 1967, when he showed a series of paintings of naked runners at the Mánes exhibition hall in Prague, he never ceased to surprise himself, critics and visitors to his exhibitions, alternating realistic scenes with stylised machines, Donald Duck, deformed female figures and geometric landscapes.
Although the interaction between men and women was a life-long subject for Načeradský, one which he explored in works frequently imbued with an almost brutal eroticism, sense of mutual struggle, careful avoidance, temptation and destructive intrigue, in the early 1990s he turned his attention to the individual, to solitary man in the universe. Working with the mathematician Jaroslav Nešetřil, he came up with “anthropogeometry”, a method which among other things influenced the drawings he made for two exhibitions at Karel Tutsch’s Na bidýlku gallery (On the Shoulders of Giants 1–2, 1994 and 1995). In these, Načeradský paid tribute to the old masters and thinkers whose works let us see father than they themselves ever could.
The ensemble of drawings and prints by Jiří Načeradský – nearly 100 works reflecting the artist’s activities between 1965 and 1994 – is the largest in the Karel Tutsch Collection. The greater part of these works probably entered the collection in relation to the exhibitions that Tutsch put together in the late 1970s and early 1980s without official approval. According to personal reminiscences, he organised one such showing for Načeradský in 1978 whose explicitly sexual and sarcastic motifs made it an unforgettable experience.
