Four dozen authors are seeking a new form of sculpture and architecture

Prague - The limits, or rather the connections, between contemporary sculpture and architecture are showcased and explored in the international exhibition that opens today at the exhibition space of Karlín Studios. The exhibition, located just a short distance from another Karlín venue that will host the Prague Biennale of Visual Arts starting Wednesday, is titled Form Follows Risk and will run until July 29.
    It was curated by Jana and Jiří Ševčík from the Prague Academy of Fine Arts and Monika Mitášová from the Slovak National Gallery. The exhibition will also travel to Bratislava in August.
    This exhibition presents, after a long time, a confrontation between sculpture and architecture, and the curators aimed to highlight the mutual influence and interaction of both artistic expressions in their comparison.
    The exhibition features several prominent personalities of contemporary American and European sculpture and architecture, as well as a number of young artists who are contributing to the transformation of contemporary art.
    The Czech scene is represented, for instance, by artists Jiří Černický, Jiří David, Jiří Kovanda, Marek Meduna, Petr Lysáček, Petr Písařík, Luděk Rathouský, Lukáš Rittstein, and the architectural studios HŠH and Chalupa Architekti.
    Recently, sculpture often takes on a more conceptual form, lacking a solid structure, and frequently consists of installations. It places great emphasis on the viewer, who is essentially its center and main actor, and their own interpretation.
    The concept of the exhibition Form Follows Risk is the opposite: the complex form of the exhibited works maintains its contradictions, randomness, and openness to various interpretations, but becomes a cohesive whole, where real material values and the real, non-conceptual presence of the work are re-established.
    The pursuit of "new complexity" involves working with a multitude of components, found objects, materials, and media, including photography and video. According to the curators, this approach refers to the tradition of Dadaism: an artistic practice where neither the material, which comes from a non-artistic world, nor its aesthetic stylization matters. All the difficult-to-reconcile components enter the whole as an infinite possibility of its transformations.