Sculptor and painter Zdenek Hůla (*1948) has been present on the art scene for more than fifty years and has built up a respectable body of work that he has systematically developed from his graduation from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1972 to this day. It is precisely this continuity – the long-term pursuit of certain problems that he has been able to view from various angles – that represents one distinctive dimension of his work. He never limited himself to a single medium, moving from the classical disciplines of painting and sculpture to the object and conceptual thinking. The common denominator of these various approaches was artistic experiment, for he was always drawn to exploring new territory. And the current exhibition in the intimate space of Galerie Kuzebauch is an experiment of its own kind. Only a few of the artist's works are presented here, yet carefully selected so that they differ markedly from one another (thereby representing different facets of the artist's work) while at the same time forming an interconnected whole (thereby demonstrating the aforementioned continuity).
For Zdenek Hůla, art was never a commentary on the present, but an expression of a deeper philosophical reflection on the world. He arrives at it by the most varied means: in his sculptures he works with the qualities of natural materials, in his paintings with geometry and illusiveness. To call someone a “Renaissance artist” is an empty cliché today, but in the case of Zdenek Hůla we might make an exception. It suits him not only because of the breadth of his interests – for in his art he also touches on music and poetry – but also because in it he connects rationality with a leaning towards transcendence. It is no coincidence that the permanent exhibition of his work in Kostelec nad Černými lesy resonates so well with the sacred space of the Baroque church and the adjacent Renaissance bell tower, which he looks after. In this small town in central Bohemia he has his family roots, in the house where he and his brother once ran the famous Gallery H, one of the centres of Czech art of the 1980s, and where he now has his studio, with his sculptures in the adjacent garden. This spatio-temporal anchoring of his work is important: Hůla's artistic universe has its own inner unity, and the axis around which it revolves passes through this very place. This small exhibition speaks to that as well…
Marcel Fišer, curator of the exhibition
