Steklik's Harakiri. Views into the collections of the Olomouc Museum of Art

• EXHIBITION: Steklik’s Harakiri. Views into the collections of the Olomouc Museum of Art
• TERM: 27 02 – 25 05 2025
• OPENING: 27 02 2025 at 18:30
• VENUE: Museum of Modern Art, Gallery
• CURATORS: Martin Klimeš, Jakub Frank
• INSTALATION: Daniel Opletal, Vlastimil Sedláček, Filip Šindelář
• GRAPHIC: Petr Šmalec
• LANGUAGE EDITOR: Jakub Frank, Zuzana Henešová
• TRANSLATION: Jakub Frank, Simon Gill
• EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS: Denisa Tessenyi, David Hrbek
• LENDERS: Archive of Fine Arts, Bludný kámen, National Gallery Prague, Marie Steklíková
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: We would like to thank Marie Steklíková and Annegret Heinl for their cooperation in the preparation of the exhibition.

The exhibition Steklik’s Harakiri at the Museum of Modern Art presents the work of Jan Steklik (1938-2017) in two intertwining lines.The main, monographic one consists of an overview of thematic cycles compiled from the acquisition made by the Olomouc Museum of Art in 2023, from loans and from a selection from the artist’s estate. The second line has a rather subjective character and presents some of Steklik’s lesser-known actions and realisations carried out under the curatorship of his friend Martin Klimes.

“We did not want to show Jan Steklik as an important personality of Czech conceptual drawing – this has been done very well thanks to the monographic exhibition at the Brno House of Arts in 2018 and the subsequent monograph for the 2021 exhibition,” explains curator Jakub Frank. “Instead, we are trying to present him as a social personality, as the proverbial homo ludens, for whom play was not merely a means of distraction or a satirical reaction to the realities of the time, but directly a way of creative action, a form of coexistence and cooperation, and a language common to a circle of friends and comrades,” adds Jakub Frank.

Since the early 1980s, when Martin Klimeš and Jan Steklík met in Brno, they have been linked by friendship and numerous creative collaborations. Klimeš’s personal perspective offers us a view of Steklik’s work and life through a certain meta-perspective that combines a memoir narrative with archival research and exhibition history.It is precisely the work with archives of artists, artistic initiatives, associations and organizations that offers conclusive probes into the art history of the past decades and becomes a valuable source for mapping contemporary artistic operations.

The exhibition portrays Jan Steklik as an artist committed to light line and humour and highlights his social role in the artistic community. In addition to a selection of the best of Steklík, it also presents the almost forgotten by Steklík, drawing attention to lesser-known or almost forgotten works that did not make it into art collections and survive only in documentary photographs in the archives of exhibition institutions. At the same time, it recalls one of the creative relationships that were inseparably linked to the artist’s life and which gave rise to a whole series of sometimes carefully thought-out, but more often spontaneous or improvised situations and realisations.

Even a very attentive visitor would not be able to decipher the title of the exhibition without curatorial help. The key in this respect is the Opava House of Art with the adjacent former church, wine bar and the rugged historical exhibition spaces that have served since the beginning of the third millennium to present various positions and forms of Steklik’s art. “In addition to good beer, the local wine bar, U Přemka, offered the original Harakiri liqueur, whose peculiarly verse promotional poster hung in the wine bar area. The recipe for Harakiri was patented by Vladimír Burda, the great-grandfather of the then owner of the wine bar. The coincidence of the names of the creator of the herbal liqueur with the well-known experimental poet and art theorist was also one of the reasons why sales of this drink were higher than average during the period of Jan Steklik’s exhibitions,” reveals the mystery of the exhibition’s title, curator Martin Klimeš, who, in addition to five exhibitions at the House of Arts between 2001 and 2008, prepared four more Steklik exhibitions in Opava and the surrounding area until the artist’s death in 2017.

Translated by DeepL.com