6+1 Above Standard

Klára Hartlová, Anna Kánská, Ema Kissová, Šarlota Koucká, Tereza Mátlová, Ondřej Richter, Anna Treterová

Imagine you’re walking through the countryside. It’s pleasantly warm. There’s no wind. You’re healthy; nothing hurts. The sky is clear. You simply feel… good. You keep walking, and at some point, it becomes crystal clear that you’ve strayed from the trail. There are no trail markers anywhere. For a brief moment, you feel uncertain, but after a while, with complete peace of mind, you know that every valley has a path—and often a village as well. So you keep walking. With the same calm as before. Suddenly, you don’t need signs, instructions, or any imaginary crutch to know that everything around you is unfolding exactly as it should at this very moment. There aren’t many moments like this. That’s precisely why we need to savor them. The very act of searching for connections, instructions, and common denominators is often a more demanding process than the journey itself. What should prevail is the perception and interpretation of everything that our journey—whether real or imagined—has to offer. 

The exhibition “6+1 Above Standard” is, in essence, nothing other than the journey described above—a hike into an ideal landscape at an ideal time. Six artists dedicated to painting are joined by one sculptor. They are students from several art colleges or recent graduates. The sun is shining and the weather is beautiful. Each of the selected artists is, within their own sphere, interesting and exceptional in some way. It is not about a particular passion, technique, color, or any other label. None of these is the key to their selection. There is no tourist trail that anyone could have easily followed at the outset. What matters is each distinct story. An authentic vision of the set of phenomena and physical processes we call the world. What matters is solely the sheer quality of the results of countless individual traits and skills, which, at their intersection, materialize into something called a work of art. Without explanatory notes, probing analyses, acknowledged metamorphoses, or extensive explanations printed on office paper and placed on a “minimalist” shelf mounted on the wall next to the work—so that it (perhaps) does not distract, yet remains clearly visible in case of an almost automatic need.

 A summer above standard that, in an ideal “world,” points out an imaginary tourist sign without requiring a complicated search through a tangle of branches and summer leaves. To go straight where you naturally walk. Listen to the sounds around you and observe the surrounding landscape as attentively as possible given the moment and the season. Why? Because—and almost all of us have experienced this—we often go or head somewhere, and even though we feel we know a particular place, we suddenly find something that catches us off guard and pleasantly surprises us.

Curator: Jan Kudrna