JAN ZRZAVÝ - Painter of Dreams

City Gallery of Bratislava, the National Gallery in Prague and the Czech Centre.
The painter, draughtsman, illustrator, scenographer and graphic artist Jan Zrzavý (1890 – 1977) belongs to the most important, legendary personalities of the Czech fine art.
After thirty years, Jan Zrzavý, one of the legends of the modern Czech fine art, returns to Bratislava. At a representative exhibition the public will have an opportunity to see more than a hundred Zrzavý’s canvases, aquarelles, drawings, but also photographs from his atelier and private life.
The majority of the exhibits come from the National Gallery in Prague, represented are also artworks from other Czech galleries and private collections.
Initiator and organiser of this exhibition is the collector and art-lover Jan Kukal. For him this project is the 10th jubilee cooperation with the GMB.
The author’s creation could be characterised as connection of the Czech secession symbolism and expressionism, later with up to visible elements of cubism. A strong and decisive influence on his work had the impressionists and the Prague exhibition of the French impressionists in the year 1907 was for him the impulse for his later stay in Paris. Zrzavý’s development was also influenced by his stays in Germany and in Italy and of course by the Czech countryside and his contemporary Czech artists and authors.
He is not an artist, whose creation could be delimited by some artistic styles or streams however they would influence the modern fine art.
He was a great and peculiar appearance, whose greatness can be measured only by his creation, variety, depth and specific poetry.
The message of Jan Zrzavý’s creation is not only outside of art styles, but also outside of time, outside of a fleeting moment: it is like timeless and universal, it is the artist’s testimony about the constancy of existential matters of a human, like sadness, loneliness, humbleness, suffering, joy, creation and also extinction, life and death. And of course, there are still-lives, there is nature, cities, poetry of roofs and streets, there is dimmed firework of colours and compositions, experiment and also recourse and enlightening from the tradition.
The collection of the chosen – presented works of this artist is a unique cultural deed and a deep emotive experience.