In 2017, the Víteks were awarded the Thalia Award for Lifetime Excellence in Puppetry for their artistic work of European significance. It is no coincidence that they produced their work in a part of the Czech Republic that today is home to the country’s largest amateur puppetry community, a region where the ancient arts of puppet theatre, puppet-carving and the mysteries of mechanical theatre and nativity scenes enjoy a long and rich tradition, passed down the generations from the Baroque era all the way to the 1950s.

Věra Říčařová Vítková (*1936) attended the Secondary School of Ceramics in Bechyně in 1951–1955 and in 1959 graduated from the puppetry department at DAMU (the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague). Also in 1959, she was offered a position at the newly founded East Bohemian Puppet Theatre in Hradec Králové (later called DRAK), which is where she met František Vítek.

František Vítek (*1929) received his journeyman certificate in woodcarving from master Jaroslav Vaněk in Brno in 1948. He was admitted to the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague in 1951, but left after one semester. In 1958 he joined the East Bohemian Puppet Theatre in Hradec Králové, where he and Věra worked on numerous locally and internationally acclaimed productions.

The management of the theatre was forced to let them both go in 1981, and they have worked as freelance artists ever since. During Normalisation, the couple collaborated with the Theater am Faden in Stuttgart, Germany. After 1990, they undertook several successful foreign tours to places such as Stockholm, Antwerp, Utrecht, New York, Tokyo and Yokohama. For the past 40 years, their best known project has been the constantly changing production titled Piškanderdulá, podtitul Josefe!

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