Against Nature

The catalogue of an exhibition, organized as the first year of a regular exhibition format, pays attention to the arriving generation of Czech art scene. Their works, which do not encompass the entire scope, complexity and variety of their respective oeuvres, nevertheless betray the artists’ sense of ontological promiscuity in the heart of Nature and show how odd the so-called natural things can in fact be. The title “Against Nature” comes from the English translation of the symbolist classics by J. K. Huysmans, A rebours. But while the crucial figure of the novel, Des Esseintes, eventually prefers idealism and mysticism to naturalism and materialism, the presented artists fuse all the above-mentioned “-isms”, thus developing an all-encompassing formalism of most various personal as well as peculiar forms, in which the form and method are perfectly in tune with the contents itself.