(10/3/2013 – 1/5/2014)
Alsovo Nabrezi 12, Prague 1, http://www.galerierudolfinum.cz
Rudolfinum Gallery is a large art space located in a beautiful historical building (something one would call a “Kunsthalle” – a place for temporary exhibitions without own collections, state-funded). Rudolfinum is doing quite a good job over the years bringing over some big names in the art world and introducing them to a Czech audience.
Chapman brothers are well known for their taboo-breaking installations, once modelled after a Goya painting, once after McDonald’s Ronald McDonald in the shape of an aboriginal “African” sculpture, once ‘challenging’ Nazi symbolism by taking symbolism to extremes where these symbols fall apart. The controversy of their work lies in the fact how they work with symbols: They do not revere or shy away from them, but simply use them, the same way as children use Lego building blocks, to exemplify the dark underbelly of human psyche.
Not long ago – in the summer – I have seen a similar scale exhibition of Chapman brothers in Seoul’s SongEun Art Space (see my Seoul Art Summer 2013 blog). Rudolfinum is multiple times more spacious than SongEun art space. This gave the audience much more freedom in how they want to approach the artworks – you could walk around, observe from proximity or distance, without any protective glass vitrines or barriers as it was the case at SongEun. Especially with the life-size sculptures (and there were more of them at Rufolfinum than at SongEun) this made quite a difference. The other difference to the Seoul exhibition was a large number of prints as well as a series of large size paintings. This also added an important layer to the show: The long rows of prints showed more viewpoints onto the same subject matter and the large paintings showed the collage method employed by Chapman brothers in another medium.