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.
Painter, draughtsman, illustrator, sculptor, scenic designer and teacher Jiří Sopko (b. 1942) is an important representative of the so-called New Figuration, which took shape in the late 1960s as a counterbalance to the era’s omnipresent abstract art. In contrast to the existential melancholy of the preceding generation of artists, Sopko builds absurd dramas, presented with a marked dose of irony and done in bright, exotic colours. He briefly worked as an assistant (1969–1971) at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where – after a forced intermission during the Normalisation period – he was later named head of the Painting I studio (1990–2002) and subsequently served as the school’s rector (2002–2010).
Sopko’s early paintings inspired by the work of the Belgian painter James Ensor first attracted the attention of audiences and critics alike at his first collective exhibition at the Václav Špála Gallery (1967). In the mid-1970s, he created several lithographs and a number of colour wood-engravings. The limited expressive potential of this traditional technique highlights civilizational anxiety and the loneliness of the individual, which in his paintings is graciously hidden behind the soft strokes of the brush. Sopko captured similar emotions in a series of drawings that he made in 1977–1980, the time after Charter 77 when pressures to conform to social norms were at their peak. His works are an integral part of the artistic circle of the Czech grotesque, a style that is more brutally sarcastic than kindly humorous. He nevertheless has endeavoured to avoid being pigeonholed into categories “not of his own choosing”, and he enjoys tearing art historians’ and curators’ theoretical interpretations of his work to pieces with the simple statement that “it’s all a little bit different”.
In fact, this vocally proclaimed independence and freedom of the imagination are what impressed Karl Tutsch and are one reason why Jiří Sopko’s works were among the collector’s first major acquisitions in the 1970s. With his purchases, Tutsch thus supported an artist who, like many others, had found himself in the vacuum of Normalisation without any chance to sell or exhibit his works. The collection contains an impressive 71 works from 1969–1991.
