Josef Duchan PENTIMENT

From 2. June 2023 you can come to our gallery for a new exhibition!

The exhibition Josef Duchan PENTIMENT will present a selection of the work of Josef Duchan, a hard to classify artist with whom a breath of fresh air enters contemporary Czech art.

The exhibition will present drawings in which the artist recorded the concerts of last year’s Smetana Litomyšl Music Festival. The opening of the exhibition will take place on Friday 2 June at 5 pm at the House of the Knights. The exhibition will be open until 3 September 2023.

The painter Josef Duchan was born in 1970 in Frýdek-Místek and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts. He lives and works in Prague. His work has been exhibited in numerous solo and collective exhibitions at home and abroad.

His intuitive drawings are characterized by a complex linear structure that teeters on the edge of abstraction and representational art. In them, the coloured drawing lines cluster and overlap to create “trembling” images that reveal the artist’s inner experience of the music and bring the viewer closer to the creative process of creating the artwork, similar to the “pentimenti” technique.

The cycle of drawings based on musical motifs from the previous year’s Smetana Litomyšl was not commissioned by J. Duchan. It was a purely spontaneous gesture. The artist drew with both hands, noting individual notes, but creating multi-layered drawn structures for which the time of their creation and the source of inspiration in the form of specific musical works are known.

The exhibition will run from 3. 6. to 3. 9. 2023. The project is part of the Smetana Art Litomyšl festival.

Accompanying programme