Adolf Hoffmeister – 120 years since his birth | Gallery Millennium
On the fifteenth of August this year, the artist and writer Adolf Hoffmeister would have lived to be 120 years old. The September exhibition at the Millennium gallery will present a chamber selection of his work. The greatest attention will be paid to the likenesses of Czech and world personalities, which the author drew continuously from the mid-twenties and with which he created an “ironic chronicle of the times”.
Adolf Hoffmeister was a man of many professions and interests – writer, columnist, playwright, painter, draftsman, scenographer, caricaturist, translator, diplomat, politician, lawyer, university professor, organizer of cultural events and art collector. He became especially famous as a caricaturist of leading personalities of world and Czech culture and politics, and is considered one of the leading representatives of the Czech interwar avant-garde.
The oldest exhibited works will be Hoffmeister’s linocuts from 1917 based on Czech Cubo-Expressionism, the main part of the exhibition will be devoted to caricatures of Czech and world cultural and political personalities. Portraits of Tomáš Garrigua Masaryk, Ferdinand Peroutka, Salvador Dalí and Samuel Beckett will be on display next to each other. Special attention will also be paid to late collages with existential themes from the early seventies, which can be considered Hoffmeister’s artistic testament.
“If some of Hoffmeister’s texts only have the value of an authentic contemporary testimony or a historical document, then most of what he drew or cut and pasted as a collage retained the permanent validity of a still living work of art” wrote art historian František Šmejkal about Hoffmeister’s work in the first half of the eighties. This statement has lost none of its validity even today, and the exhibition will thus offer an opportunity to look into the still current and living work of an extraordinary personality of Czech culture of the twentieth century.
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