For the second year in succession, the tichyocean is delighted to present selected works from its art collection. Following last year’s exhibition “Selbst, Self, I”, this year’s exhibit “Raum, Körper, Kontur” showcases works by artists from Prague and Vienna: Arnulf Rainer, Jiří Kovanda and the Gelitin collective.

Arnulf Rainer

In his continuous quest for transformation, the Austrian painter Arnulf Rainer (*1929) elevated Übermalungen (overpaintings) to an art genre. The idea originated out of sheer necessity. Due to the lack of materials, he began overpainting other artists’ works and thus became one of the most successful painter of the post-war period. Fascinated by Miroslav Tichý’s idiosyncratic photographs, Arnulf Rainer sought out Tichý in 1992 to buy works for his Art Brut collection. But Tichý refused to sell anything and instead offered to swap works. This exchange laid the founding principle for the art collection “Artists for Tichy – Tichy for Artists”, which the Tichy Ocean Foundation has continued ever since. All artworks in this exhibition were exchanged.

In 2006, Arnulf Rainer expressed the wish to work on nude photographs by Miroslav Tichý. The foundation supplied him with 27 inkjet prints of photographs of women that Tichý had taken over the years from his television screen. Rainer overdraws these “screenshots” of Tichý with wild, energetic strokes and moody accents. His intervention sets the motif in motion and ripples into a disturbing effect. A dichotomy of provocation and violation appears. The female bodies of actresses, broadcasted by Austrian television around 30 years ago, broke through the iron curtain via airwaves to be captured in silver by the photographer Tichý. They returned to Austria to be overdrawn by Rainer. The radical, uncompromising gestures of the painter unleash untamed power and combine figuration and abstraction.

Jiří Kovanda

The Prague-based self-taught artist Jiří Kovanda (*1953) has been known since the 1970s for his delicate, poetic gestures, actions and interventions and is one of the Czech Republic’s most influential artists. The objects selected for the exhibition are a quartered table inhabiting the room’s four corners, an armchair with a sawn-off leg and the artist’s shoes with spaghetti instead of shoe laces. The objects, prised from everyday life—relics of a moment long gone—examine the connection between time and space. They refer to the presence in absence, a body that used them once upon a time. They intricately explore what lies hidden in the daily humdrum.

Gelitin (until 2005 named Gelatin)

The Viennese artists’ collective Gelitin was founded in 1978 and has been exhibiting internationally since 1993. These five artists stand in the tradition of Viennese Actionism. Dadaistically absurd elements, plus unusual or recycled materials, are characteristic of their practice: a Mona Lisa made of colourful plasticine for children, a teddy bear in a jar and a knitted dead rabbit with its intestines dangling. They provoke humorously and playfully by dealing with taboo topics of physicality and sexuality. The wooden sculpture Untitled, also on display, was assembled from the back of Viennese Thonet chairs. The sculpture is reminiscent of the contours of a body that moves in space and dances with the viewer.