The Personality of the Year in Visual Arts is Zbyněk Baladrán

Prague - The Personality of the Year Award for the most significant artistic achievement of 2014 was awarded to forty-one-year-old Zbyněk Baladrán. The jury recognized him for a series of smaller exhibitions in the Czech Republic and abroad. Baladrán is one of the most distinctive figures of the contemporary Czech art scene, even though he may not be very well known to the general public. This year, the top ten artists also included Avděj Ter-Oganjan, Michal Kalhous, Krištof Kintera, Milan Grygar, Václav Girsa, Marek Meduna, Vratislav Karel Novák (in memoriam), Petr Kvíčala, and Lenka Vítková.
    "Baladrán's installations and video essays are visually unpretentious on one hand, yet very thoughtful and precisely composed on the other. If the viewer finds a way to his works, a thought-provoking world full of unexpected connections and associations and unsettling questions about our present opens up to them,” characterizes Baladrán's work Silvie Šeborová, editor-in-chief of the Artalk.cz portal. She organizes the award ceremony along with the magazine Art&Antiques and the Gallery of Fine Arts in Cheb.
    Zbyněk Baladrán had solo exhibitions last year in Munich, Delme in France, and Prague. In addition, he was one of the curators of the group exhibition Report on the Construction of a Space Module at the New Museum in New York. As the architect of the exhibition, he also participated in several museum exhibitions - from the showcase of Zbyněk Sekal at the West Bohemian Gallery in Pilsen to the exhibition Josef Váchal: The Magic of Searching in the Gallery of the Capital City of Prague, and up to the current exhibition Brněnský Devětsil at the Moravian Gallery in Brno. Baladrán is a member of the Tranzitdisplay association and is represented by the Hunt Kastner gallery in Prague.
    The winner is selected by a ten-member jury composed of curators and art theorists from various generations, who operate not only in Prague but also in Ostrava, Zlín, Brno, Ústí nad Labem, or Český Krumlov. "In recent years, we have observed that the jurors pay little attention to large survey exhibitions and rather seek actions that are in some sense innovative," says Jan Skřivánek, editor-in-chief of Art&Antiques.
    The award takes the form of a black square, created by the previous laureate, and this year's will be the work of Dominik Lang. "The black square is a reference to Malevich's famous painting, which is one of the icons of modern art. However, it can also just be a piece of mechanically painted canvas or paper,” says the founder of the award, director of the Gallery of Fine Arts in Cheb, Marcel Fišer. "This contradiction suits the award because we do not want to pretend to be the Oscars and act too seriously."