Jiri Kovanda - 'Jiri Kovanda Versus Rest Of The World'

"One of the most impressive living artists in Czech Republic, Jiri Kovanda has realised since the late 70s discreet actions, almost impossible to distinguish from real life : bumping into passers-by, waiting for the telephone to ring, attempting to meet girls in the street… Poetical as much as political, like Bas Jan Ader or Douglas Huebler’s works, his gestures question the place of an individual in social space, staying apart from any reaction to the context of the soviet period in Eastern Europe.
With historical and recent pieces, the exhibition will propose as well a curatorial statement : a series of links to Kovanda’s work through a vast number of documents, roughly xeroxed : reproductions of works of art, of news images… Associations of ideas, visual echoes, intuitive links, structural or formal. Jiri Kovanda’s work, at the centre of this web of images, gestures and energies, proves its universality."