The Century of Relativity exhibition bids farewell in its current form

The permanent exhibition Century of Relativity was opened by the Olomouc Museum of Art in 2013. Its aim was to present the best of a broad – often contradictory in terms of opinion and style – spectrum of key or otherwise important works of art from the 20th century, which are part of the rich collection of the Olomouc Museum of Art.

The first part of the exhibition in the Mansard, dedicated to the first half of the 20th century, remains unchanged. It highlights paintings and sculptures that reflect the fundamental trends and tendencies in Czech modern art during the period in question. The exhibition in the introductory section reflects the fading of Impressionism and, in contrast to it, presents manifestations of Symbolism and Decadence from the early 20th century. The focus of the exhibition is on presenting modern trends from Expressionism, Cubism, and Cubo-Expressionism to Civilism or, conversely, Exoticism of the 1920s. The end of the 1920s and the 1930s are devoted to abstract expressions and surrealism. The last chapter consists of works reflecting the era of the war apocalypse in various forms. A specific chapter of this part of the exhibition is modern landscape painting, whose most significant works also reflect (albeit in a different language) the atmosphere of the era in which they were created.

The exhibition begins with examples of the work of important individual artists of the 1950s and artists who followed on from the pre-war avant-garde. It then focuses on the emergence of post-war abstraction, i.e. works associated with various forms of lyrical and structural abstraction. Of the many conflicting tendencies of the 1960s, the exhibition is dominated by examples of the widespread influence of Lettrism and Neo-Constructivism, which contrast with the paintings and sculptures of the so-called New Figuration, Czech Grotesque, and later Existential Figuration of the 1970s and 1980s. The exhibition concludes with conceptual and postmodern expressions, whose “blessed and unblessed influences” have clearly affected the art of the last decade.

The Picture Gallery however, does not house Czech art only; we also strive to include the Czech collection into a broader context in relation to our acquisition efforts related to the Central European Forum Olomouc Project. Therefore, there are examples of exile authors and prominent Polish, Hungarian, and Slovak authors as well.