Kurt Gebauer

co-created with Diana Winklerová

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. He belongs in this place. Behind a giant stands opinion, work, and legend—the legend of the State of Gebauer, of flyers, swimmers, running girls, of the Cricket’s Dream on a couch, of ladies in the windows of Lesser Town courtyards, of Dwarfs, the Greeters at Rockfest, the Caterpillar of early capitalism, the Studio of All Sculpture, and the Heart by the National Theatre. The role of the sculptor is to ennoble space and to sing an Ode to Joy.

Kurt Gebauer, born in 1941 in Hradec nad Moravicí, studied at the School of Applied Arts in Brno and the School of Sculpture and Stone Masonry in Hořice in the Krkonoše foothills. He graduated from the Sculpture Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague under Professors Makovský and Lidický, completed an internship with O. H. Hajek in Stuttgart, and worked in the renowned studio of César at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. During the normalization period, he lived with his family in isolation in Stradonice, where he founded his own State of Gebauer, complete with its own anthem, culture, and soft sculptures. He took part in unofficial activities and critiqued the regime through his dwarf sculptures. He explored themes of adolescence and puberty and created the Landscape of Games in Ostrava. Since 1990, he taught at UMPRUM in Prague; today, he works with students at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen and at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University. He is a sculptor, painter, photographer, author of drawings and installations, philosopher, writer, poet, educator, and performer.

https://kurtgebauer.cz/

Martina Vítková