Cake and Lemon Eaters / V. Pivovarov, G. Quinn

This catalogue was published to accompany the exhibition of the same name held at Prague’s Rudolfinum, which moved to Ostrava’s House of Art in 2014. Curator Petr Nedoma’s selection focused on two figures from two different generations and two different geopolitical and indeed mental spaces: Ged Quinn (born 1963 in Liverpool) and Viktor Pivovarov (born 1936 in Moscow). In both cases the curator chose relatively recent paintings in order to reveal the similarities between the two artists. The primary aim was to cast light on the phenomenon of post-production; since the 1990s many painters have been drawing directly from older (often iconic) art works or formal approaches, adding their own distinctive signature and transforming the original artefact. This creates iconographic rebus-type puzzles which require viewers to possess a certain knowledge of the artistic “world map” if they are to successfully decode them.