The twenty-third work was selected by the shoe designer Oldrich Voyta.

“I chose Bedřich Dlouhý’s Alley of Courage partly due to the grey colour palette, which in combination with the red figure seems to express the mood of society at the time (1958), and partly due to the fact that Dlouhý grew up in Plzeň, a city where I lived for several years after graduating from the Prague Conservatory. The horizontal concept of the work, together with its title, seem to encourage the individual to set out on their own path, a path that requires courage – and nowadays, in an era of social media and trend-following, this is a very relevant message.”

The series of single-work exhibitions will continue until the completion of the Gallery’s new extension, designed by the architect Josef Pleskot, which will be evocatively named The White Shadow. The exhibitions aim to raise public awareness of the Gallery’s extensive collections, which currently cannot be exhibited in their entirety due to a lack of space. The project will also present our collection as a living organism, constantly growing and evolving.
Besides raising awareness of the Gallery’s collections, these single-work exhibitions will also play a key role in generating the visual style of the Gallery’s promotional materials. Based on the work currently displayed, the graphic design team will create a colour scheme that will feature on quarterly or monthly programmes, leaflets and other materials.
The curators of the single-work exhibitions will change like the works themselves. Instead of art historians, the curators will be drawn from a wide range of other creative professions – artists themselves, writers, actors and directors, architects, scientists and scholars, musicians, restorers, and more. Their artistic sensitivity and inventive approach will make them ideal ‘guest curators’ for this series. Each curator will prepare a talk, a reading or a different type of presentation to explain why they have chosen their particular work. The curators have a completely free choice – they can select works from any period and in any medium, so the exhibitions will feature a huge variety, ranging from 19th-century painting and drawing to contemporary photography.

Robert V. Novák and Zuzana Burgrová