The concept of the historically focused collection exhibition How to Collect Art: the Karel Tutsch Story will be expanded by a series of exhibitions of the youngest generation of artists, current students or graduates from art school studios. In this way, the curators will revive Tutsch's basic strategy of discovering and presenting the works of previously unknown artists in a new context. Gallery Na bidýlku II will thus become a laboratory for new approaches to the traditional medium of painting and installation, whose transformations Tutsch has followed and supported for several decades.
Hygiene is a fascinating and broad field possessing multiple layers and meanings within the historical as well as contemporary context. It is traditionally associated with cleanliness, health and the prevention of disease, but in the field of art it can also include an exploration of social, cultural, political and aesthetic aspects. Matěj Liška (b. 1998) understands hygiene primarily as care – not just caring for oneself, but also caring for objects and things. It is in this spirit that he approaches the objects he uses in his work.
Besides care, Liška has also been long interested in the subject of education and child-rearing. He explores the interaction between various aspects in our lives, their patterns and paradigms, how they “work” us, and the subsequent impact of combinations of various such aspects. These “clashes” not only play out within the framework of our broader social system but also permeate intimate areas such as family, friendships and self-reflection. Liška’s works call attention to important themes that accompany our personal efforts at putting down roots in the system in which we live.
Liška initially explored specific urban, linguistic or gallery-related phenomena. Today, his art is increasingly focused on questions that draw from personal experience. His graduation work, Take Root (2024), consisted of two projects. The first – The Residue of Work Properly Done – consisted of drawings from children’s colouring books framed in concrete frames made by the artist himself. Liška approached the colouring books (a medium usually intended for fun, relaxation or practising motor skills) as a task that had to be completed at the highest possible level of quality, colouring in the images exactly according to the outlines. The second group of works from the project, titled Have I Ever Told You about the Qualities of Rectangular Solids?, consisted of collected stones that became Liška’s “audience” as he told them about things from everyday life which he considered useful – for instance, geometrically precise mass-produced forms that the stones wouldn’t be familiar with from their natural surroundings.
In this way, Liška was metaphorically thinking about the future, about the shaping of individuals and the community. The traditional view of subjective and shared identity draws on historical and cultural roots, which are expressed in the family environment, in the community and in the place that this community shapes – how it “carves” us into a particular shape and influences how we conform to an individual standard, how we present ourselves and how we are generally perceived by society.
The site-specific exhibition Hygiene of the Common Good continues in this vein, with Liška exploring questions that influence our understanding of the world around us and our place within it. His works ask us to consider how our inner worlds, formed by our upbringing, cultural norms and personal experience, are reflected in the outer world, and in what manner this outer world reflects our mental health and well-being. Can we truly understand a smile automatically as an expression of happiness?
