The theme of this exhibition is an imaginary conversation between two people who were artistically active and very close to one another. The exhibition deals with the harmonious relationship of two distinctive artistic personalities who lived together and created side by side for some seven decades. At the same time it highlights the difference in their artistic approaches. Each of the two artists developed their own original style; even thematically they only rarely met over the course of their creative careers. Although they had the same collaborators in the glassworks, their work is independent of one another and entirely distinctive.
The introverted Miluše Roubíčková is represented here by the flowers she dealt with in an original way from the late 1960s. At each showing they always take on a different, unrepeatable form. René Roubíček, who appeared to those around him as an extrovert bursting with positive energy, is represented by busts from the end of his life. As they have not previously been exhibited on such a scale, in both cases this is a premiere of sorts at Galerie Kuzebauch.
Diverse in form – here fragile, there sculpturally conceived in symbols – the flowers of Miluše Roubíčková fit perfectly into her distinctively poetic world populated with brightly coloured glass bundt cakes, lollipops, fruit, vegetables, bowls and vases of sweets, sticks, little bags and other objects that emotionally carry us back to happy childhood days; and some consider them to relate to pop art. In his late female busts, René Roubíček built on his more serious, more statuesque, predominantly male half-figures and heads from the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. He gave them, however, more flowing movement, colour and playfulness, and spiced them with a touch of irony. He called them either “Beautiful Ladies” or, because they were made after his ninetieth birthday, “After Ninety” – “Afterky” for short.
The works of Miluše and René Roubíček are full of emotion, radiating the “joy of life”, as René Roubíček often put it. It compelled him to keep creating, together with the conviction “and why not?, as long as I'm alive!”. Through the exhibited works of art, let us enjoy this joy as a greeting and wise advice from him and his beloved wife Miluše.
Curator of the exhibition: Milan Hlaveš
