Differentiated Structures / Jana Bernartová, Milan Guštar, Ivan Chatrný
16/02/24–26/05/24

The Gallery of Modern Art presents recent works by visual artist Jana Bernartová (*1983), on display in the gallery’s Black Box exhibition space. The artist’s large-format embroidery Raster ZERO #heroine II (2020–2021) from the series Parametric Digital Structure is presented within the context of works by printmaker Ivan Chatrný (1928–1983) and multimedia artist Milan Guštar (*1963) from the gallery’s collections: Guštar’s audiovisual installation Abacus from 2002–2013 and Chatrný’s Orchestral Composition screenprints from the late 1960s. Both these artists have been of fundamental importance for Bernartová at various stages in her career. While Chatrný’s prints represented a key source of inspi-ration for her reflections on structure during her student days, for Bernartová as an artist with a back-ground in the latest technologies, Guštar’s work is fascinating mainly for how it touches on a broad range of artistic media.

Differentiated Structures takes the form of an intimate intergenerational conversation framed by the subject of structure. The selected works by these three artists from different generations offer a variety of views on this subject. The exhibition also emphasizes the broad range of media used by these artists, from the classical printmaking technique of screenprinting to object art, audiovisual installations, and graphic scores and musical notation. It does so in an attempt at presenting a stimu-lating and visually attractive way of learning about one of the most distinctive artistic tendencies of the past fifty years – rationally oriented artistic creation based on an exploration of mathematical principles. Although the choice of exhibited works may at first glance appear to be based solely on form (the repetitive ordering of chosen elements into structures or an exploration of the concept of serial production), the exhibition seeks to call attention to the works’ layered context and to aspects introduced into con-temporary art by artists working with the latest technologies.

JANA BERNARTOVÁ (*1983) is a visual artist. She explored several “media” during her studies. She began her university education at the Faculty of Art and Architecture of Liberec Technical University, specifically in Stanislav Zippe’s studio of Visual Communication and Digital Media. She concluded her master’s degree studies by graduating from Václav Stratil’s intermedia studio at Brno’s FAVU and earned her doctorate from Federico Díaz’s Supermedia Studio at Prague’s Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design. In fact, central themes in her work have included glitches in the digital image and the tension between the virtual world and lived reality and between data and its material expressions. She has organized the international Art Week Liberec festival since 2016, and she is vice-rector for study affairs at the Academy of Fine Arts
in Prague.

MILAN GUŠTAR (*1963) is an artist known for his activities in a variety of scientific and artistic fields. The main focus of his interest is music. Guštar composes pieces for electroacoustic and traditional musical instruments, as well as music for theater and film. In his compositions, he makes use of mathematical concepts and algorithms. He has been a teacher and researcher at the Music Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague for the last fifteen years. He has also taught at FAMU’s Center for Audiovisual Studies. He is the author of the two-volume compendium Elektrofony (Electrophones, 2007) summarizing the history and principles of electromechanical and electronic musical instruments – instruments which he himself designs and constructs. As a programmer, he creates technical solutions for multimedia works and installations. In 2013, he presented his own intermedia art at his first solo exhibition, held at Prague’s DOX Centre for Contemporary Art.

IVAN CHATRNÝ (1928–1983) was a leading figure on Brno’s art scene in the mid-twentieth century and he influenced it with his unique contributions to the question of constructive tendencies and his long-time teaching activities. After studying at Brno’s School of Artistic Craftsmanship in 1943–1946, he apprenticed as a lithographer and subsequently worked in that field. From 1968 until his premature death in 1983, he taught promotional design at the Secondary School of Applied Art  in Brno. The main body of Chatrný’s oeuvre consists of structural pieces from the late 1960s and early 1970s that he made in the spirit of constructive tendencies. In the 1970s, Chatrný collaborated with Jiří Valoch on a series of artist’s books, and in the 1980s he dedicated himself to gestural records made by drawing on film emulsion. Despite his participation in numerous exhibitions of graphics and by the Club of Concretists (of which he was a member in 1968–1971), his work is not well known by the general public.

The exhibition was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the Statutory City of Hradec Králové.