JOSEF KOTRBA

DISCOVERED PAINTER JOSEF KOTRBA

The discovery of the paintings left behind by architect and painter Josef Kotrba (1896-1984) was a great surprise and an inspirational stimulus. Almost nobody knows him and almost nobody knows anything about him. Yet his work says a lot about him. He was interested in the area where he lived: town Králův Dvůr near Beroun, the factories, the architecture, the landscape. He captured people's lives in numerous genre compositions and focused his distinctive imagination on the world of fairy tales, operas and art. The range of subjects in his paintings is surprising. Characteristic is his colouring based on many local tones creating an impressive chord. The many paintings available today show that painting was an important part of his life, but remained a private affair. The majority of Kotrba's work shows features of naive painting, although he was not a completely untrained painter. His studies in architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague undoubtedly provided him with a basic art education alongside his main field of study. With this exhibition, Arthouse Hejtmánek hopes to enrich the general awareness of a new phenomenon in our cultural history. We cordially invite you to the sales exhibition entitled Josef Kotrba, the Found Painter, from September 15 to October 30.

OUTSIDER ART

The history of modern art has seen repeated waves of interest in non-professional work, for which the name outsider art has become common knowledge. Untrained painters and sculptors represent a kind of parallel, internally diverse world existing alongside and outside of art. Over time, a number of technical terms have been coined for this phenomenon, including: naive art, spontaneous art, primitivism (without pejorative content), the French term art brut, Outsider Art in English, Self-taught Art, Visionary Art, arte irregolare in Italian, naive Kunst in German, Irrenkunst. Some of them try to cover the whole issue, others reflect various substantively and formally incompatible subcategories of this broad field. They include, for example, children's drawing and painting, amateur art, folk art, media art, the work of autodidacts and naive art in the true sense of the word.

You can find us at Goetheho 17/2 in Prague 6 - Bubenč. Open daily (including Saturdays and Sundays) from 11 am to 6 pm. We hope that this exhibition will enrich the general awareness of a new phenomenon in our cultural history.