This exhibition of three artists from different generations explores the reflection of human feelings, experience, and memory in visual art. The central theme is “a human being naked in their fate” (F. Hrubín) – an individual in the world within arm’s reach, where the ominous ticking of impermanence is ever-present. The exhibition The Heart is a Temple is conceived as a return to the purest phenomena associated with the passage of time and the perception of space. In the same vein, the exhibition accentuates rather traditional means of the artistic expression of these themes. The artwork will feature graphics, photographs, and sculptures from both national and private collections. 

Renowned Czech graphic artist Alena Kučerová (1935) represents the oldest generation. In her work, she transforms the banality of everyday existence into vital and melancholic variations on footprints of memory. Her metal plates and art prints bring past events and the places visited by the artist into the present. Her works are gestures of personal attachment to moments of joy and distress in her life. 

Photographer Ivan Pinkava (1961), renowned at home and abroad, is the second exhibiting artist. In his work, Pinkava sensitively explores people as self-contradictory beings torn between hope and despair. Symbols, objects, and human gestures here refer to the deeply archetypal, incessant search for the very sense of our own existence.

The works of young sculptor Kateřina Komm (1990) complete the exhibition’s selection. Her monumental and smaller sculptures illustrate the contemporary feminine principle, reflecting processes of emancipation, corporeality, motherhood, responsibility, and belief. Similar to the other two artists, linear time is interspersed with cyclical retrospectives in her creations, where people are perceived as an inherent part of a naturally renewing world, alienated by civilization.

The exhibition’s title, The Heart is a Temple, inspired by Kateřina Komm's eponymous work, refers to the ahistorical dimension of human experience. It symbolizes a renewed focus on our relationship with time – a theme that has returned to the limelight in our times, which, it would seem, are falling into an ever-deeper abyss of scepticism.

Petr Vaňous, curator of the exhibition