Black Suns / The Other Face of Modernity

Black Suns / The Other Face of Modernity (Černá slunce / Odvrácená strana modernity) is the title of a book published to accompany an exhibition of the same name at GVU Ostrava and presents a fascinating picture of Czech art roughly around the years 1928–1942.

It captures an exceptionally eventful period that was marked by many complex political and artistic developments. The wider framework of the competing artistic and intellectual approaches of this period involved more than forty different individuals – painters, sculptors, designers, photographers, and architects, many of whom were among the top figures in Czech art overall. The book focuses on the other face of modernity as represented by the overlooked, elusive intellectual dimensions that formed the substantive, impersonal psychological structures of the period.

Black suns are the ‘suns of other worlds’, the ones that Karel Hynek Mácha focused on and whose principles derive from Romanticism. Although the term ‘avant-garde’ took root and began to be used to refer to expressions of modernism as a whole, the original avant-garde principles from the early 1920s grew to encompass other sources of meaning and significance. The selected time frame is interpreted as one when various currents, ideas, and art directions intersected and collided.