02 Mar 2017

Milan Grygar at FAIT Gallery, Brno, Czech Republic

Fait Gallery enters the spring season with a spectacular exhibition of art work by an icon of Czech modern and contemporary art, Milan Grygar. One year after moving the gallery to the Vaňkovka foundry plant, the entire space including the bridge will be dedicated to a project called Light, Sound, Motion, which will offer to the Brno public audience an insight into the artist's work after a long 25 years. The exhibition will be opened by a vernissage with the participation of the author on Wednesday, 8th March 2017 at 7pm.

The main intention of one of the most extensive exhibitions of Milan Grygar's artwork (b. 1926) is, compared to other retrospectives, to emphasize the multimedia aspect of his work, especially the still often neglected acoustic component of his work and its contribution to the overall perception of the artist's work. For more than five decades Milan Grygar explores specific relations of the visual and the acoustic. After a long and concentrated exploration of sound and the rhythm of pencils on paper whilst creating a series of drawings, he recorded the first accurate audio recording of drawings on tape. This moment started a relentless search for other possibilities of linking sound with motion and pictures, which the author has been dealing with till now. The phenomenon of sound has permanently been present in Grygar's art work since the mid-60s, when the author, after a full focus on the medium of drawing, systematically started to examine it and to record it.

„Acoustic drawing is listening drawing, sound created and organised by drawing. It is an activity that oscillates between solid and non-solid, permanent and non-permanent. It is a symphony between image and sound, strategy and structure of the acoustic and optical. It is the language of drawing and sounding objects. It is a symbiosis of the play between drawing and sound, visual and audio action,' describes Grygar.

The cross-section through the artist's work involving both older and recent works for more than fifty years is, within the exhibition Light, Sound, Motion, divided into several parts in order to notify the viewer about all the related links of the artist's development. Thanks to new recordings, made for this exhibition, the audience will be able to perceive most of the artworks audio-visually. An important part of Milan Grygar's work are also the performances that will be available to watch from the original recordings.

„As the centerpiece of the exhibition the Black painting, an often referenced monochrome canvas painting, that symbolically closed the early stage of Grygar's creation as a painter and which was followed by several years of passion for drawing and its sound dimension. This monochrome notionally separates strictly the painting related part with monumental spatial scores and early large-format drawings and paintings with sticks, which is, with a straightforward emphasis to acoustic perception, followed by acoustic drawings and scores,' says the curator and art director of the Fait Gallery Denisa Kujelová about the main aim of the exhibition.