Artists: Kateřina Adamová / Anonym / Barbora Balek / Christina Bardram / Erika Bornová / Veronika Bromová / Filip Černý / Salvador Dalí / Alén Diviš / Eva Fuka / Kurt Gebauer / Antonín Gribovský / Patrik Hábl / Alexandr Hackenschmied / Jolana Havelková / Jan Hísek / Veronika Holcová / Anežka Hošková / Petr Jedinák / Václav Jirásek / Jana Kasalová / Michaela Kukovičová / Krištof Kintera / Martin Kocourek / Alena Kotzmannová / Františka Kuchařová / Zlatka Lamrová / Helena Lukas / Cecílie Marková / Daniela Mikulášková / Jakub Nepraš / Petr Nikl / Martina Niubó Klouzová / Klára Ottová / Suzanne Pastor / František Jaroslav Pecka / Eugenio Percossi / Magdaléna Peševa / Daniel Pešta / Kateřina Piňosová / Ladislav Postupa / Pavel Pražák / Jaroslav Róna / Lucie Rónová / Jaroslav Rössler / Nadia Rovderová / Zuzana Růžičková / Dominika Slavická / František Skála / Dalibor Smutný / Josef Sudek / Jan Svoboda / Dagmar Šubrtová / Jan Švankmajer / Miro Švolík / Kai Teichert / Vladimír Véla / Zara Wildmoons / Stanislav Zámečník / Veronika Zapletalová / Anna Zemánková / Peter Župník
Art glass, jewelry and design: Nastassia Alejnikava / Lenka Čermáková / Michaela Gorcová / Klára Horáčková / Anna Jožová / František Jungvirth / Vladimír Kopecký / Barbora Křivská / Hanuš Lamr / Petr Písařík / Anna Polanská / Isabela Sopková / Eva Růžičková / Sota Sakuma / Lada Semecká
The Floralia exhibition offers a counterpoint to the unsettling atmosphere of recent times. It aims to be an encouraging celebration of the indomitable vital forces of nature, a fulfilment of the desire for beauty and renewal.
The statement of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in his speech to the European Parliament on 1 March 2022 was chosen as a motto of the project: “And then life will win over death and light will win over darkness.”
Natural themes have appeared steadily in visual art across the centuries. The depiction of plants has varied from the descriptive naturalistic to decorative and to the abstractly symbolic, too. Flowers provide a wide range of symbolic meanings, from hope and faith, tenderness, fragility, love, birth, flowering, intoxication, passion, as well as unfulfilled desire, destruction, betrayal and disappointment, to dying and vanitas – the feeling of impermanence and futility of being. Their multifaceted iconography enables the expression of the whole spectrum of states and feelings accompanying human existence.
The selection of works for the Floralia / In Sacrifio Florum project in Museum Montanelli focuses on the imaginative principle of creation. The variety of artistic approaches and means represented, ranging from classical media such as drawing, painting, mezzotint and sculpture, to experimental embroideries, collages and video art as well as examples of design work (glass, jewellery…), all mirrors the multitude of floral forms in the inner and outer space of a creator. Among the exhibited artists we can find spiritistic mediums from the first half of the 20th century, Anna Zemánková, an important author of world art brut, and other spontaneous creators, but above all several dozen artworks by contemporary Czech and foreign artists who use flowers as a projection of hidden meanings and inner feelings of a 20th and 21st century wo/man rather than for decorative purposes.
