The festive opening of the exhibition VLADIMÍR KOKOLIA: 1984

Vladimír Kokolia (born in 1956) is one of the most important contemporary Czech artists. Kokolia gained international attention at the beginning of the 1990s, which led to exhibitions of his works at documenta (Kassel, Germany); the Third Eye Center (Glasgow, UK); the Ludwig Forum (Aachen, Germany); S.M.A.K. (Gent, Belgium); the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts; the Walker Hill Art Center (Seoul, South Korea); the Otis/Parsons Gallery (Los Angeles, USA); PS1 (New York, USA) and many others. More recently, he presented major solo exhibition projects at MOCA in Chengdu, China, and at the IKON Gallery in Birmingham, UK. Besides being an artist, he was also the lead singer and lyricist of the legendary Czech underground rock band “E”. His deep philosophical and spiritual explorations in a variety of practices are reflected in his art. Kokolia is also committed to art education and has taught many outstanding young artists for nearly 30 years at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

In the early 1980s Kokolia began applying the concept of “stereograms” to his works as yet another level of the viewer’s involvement in the image space. The gloom and the metaphor of vain pursuit taken to the extreme, became a harbinger of his future drawings known as the Lesser and Greater cycle. The birth of these drawings is connected with the period of basic military service in the first half of the 80s, when Kokolia practically abandoned the medium of painted images. In them, the existential oppression is brought to a state of crazy irony, which he also begins to develop in his graphic works at about the same time. Sketching quickly with bold lines, he simplified individuals as worm-like characters in a variety of absurd scenarios in which they resisted fate and fought to survive. They often find themselves trapped in bizarre, illogical predicaments they cannot escape, but their strenuous efforts to disentangle themselves are both funny and futile. Kokolia once shared the motivation that drove him to create these works: “I’m fascinated by the gulf between the utter matter-of-factness with which we accept our daily routines and the obvious senselessness of it all.”

A part of the exhibition are also Illustration for the samizdate edition of Orwell's novel 1984 and Illustration for an unknown short story published by samizdate in 1981. Recent oil paintings such as Under the walnut (2020), Leaves (2020), Inside (2020) and Wave Theory I (2023) can be seen at the Prague House Gallery.

The event was accompanied by a musical performance by Albert Romanutti, frontman of the popular Czech band Bert & Friends.