Jiří Hůla: Eight Crosses

As part of the FALL festival there will be a guided tour of the exhibition Jiří Hůla: Eight
Crosses led by curator Barbora Špičáková on Friday, 20 September 2024 at 17:00 in the
Fine Art Archive at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art. The event will also include the launch of the book Edice současné poezie Cesty (The Voyages editions of contemporary poetry), which is the fifth volume in the series BOOKS, which presents significant achievements of Czech typography

In honour of what would have been the eightieth birthday of Czech artist, graphic designer, columnist, art theorist, and author of visual poetry Jiří Hůla, the Fine Art Archive at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art presents his body of work associated with the exceptional technique of so-called scalpel drawing. In the early 1980s, Hůla began selecting colour images from the pages of foreign magazines with high-quality printing, which he would then imprint, redraw, translate, and transform onto handmade paper, millimetre by millimetre, by making very consistent cuts with a scalpel. Scalpel drawing is also remarkably closely connected with Hůla’s interest in poetry, in playing with the reduction of texts and poems. The imprinting of an image by making delicate incisions brings an unexpected perspective to any – albeit common and consumerist – motif, and with surprising subtlety (he kept some of the remnants of the incised photos).

In the 1990s, Hůla discovered the Xerox machine, and he began making black-and-white
copies of his scalpel drawings, enlarging them, and further working with them. In the year
2000, he then combined the scalpel drawings with the technique of silkscreen printing and created a large number of variants and variations of several motifs assembled according to clear rules into his series Velká metafora (The great metaphor).

The exhibition is taking place in the library of the Fine Art Archive at the DOX Centre for
Contemporary Art. It was prepared by Martin Hůla, Jindřiška Jonešová, Jan Kuntoš, and
Barbora Špičáková.