Kurt Gebauer

Opening on April Fool's Day is a giant of Czech art—an artist who entered history not only by creating dwarfs, but also by founding his own state. For more than two decades, he led the Studio of All Sculpture at UMPRUM, from which around 150 sculptors emerged into the world, including David Černý, represented here at the Musoleum.

We are used to sculptures looking down at the viewer from a pedestal. Here, from a raised platform, sculptor Kurt Gebauer looks down at the visitors. Six portrait heads are at the same time landscapes. What can be placed into a limited space from a mega-life? Everything. The face of both the young and the seasoned sculptor becomes an album of all that he has done. Each head is shaped from thousands of drawings, paintings, sculptures, objects, snapshots from openings, documentation of public installations, images with students—everything that makes a life interesting.

The exhibition works with the myth of the sculptor as a titan, told through the lives and forms of Phidias, Michelangelo, and Rodin. Kurt Gebauer undoubtedly belongs among them.

Martina Vítková