Karel Nepraš - A retrospective

The DOX Centre for Contemporary Art prepared a retrospective of Karel Nepraš for the summer of 2012. Nepraš is one of a small number of leading Czech artists to whom Czech museum and gallery institutions owe a representative exhibition and publication. The exhibition shall map Nepraš’s sculptural and graphic art within the contexts of the time of their origin, and shall for the first time provide an overall view of his work, without which it would be impossible to imagine Czech sculpture of the second half of the 20th century. The exhibition presents the artist’s most prestigious pieces, as well as lesser known or entirely unknown works. It is prepared by the curator team of the DOX centre in co-operation with the artist’s family, friends and experts on his work. An extensive monograph with a detailed documentation and texts by a range of authors engaging with the artist’s work shall be published for the occasion of the exhibition. Karel Nepraš emerged as one of the most innovative Czech artists in the latter half of the 20th century. He and his generation of artists were responsible for a boom of Czech visual culture in the 1960s. He first distinguished himself as a cartoonist and cartoons inspired his sculptures. This unusual intersection of sculpture and cartoon humour shaped the unique nature of Nepraš’s oeuvre. The artist himself described it as a clash of humour and gravity. According to him, humour was not only an artistic strategy but a defence mechanism for preserving sanity in a society full of absurdity. In the 1950s and 1960s he co-founded two artistic groups, the Šmidras and the Crusaders’ School of Pure Humour Without Jokes.