5 p.m.

The patron of the exhibition is Lukáš Curylo, Deputy Governor of the Moravian-Silesian Region.
The project is financially supported by Czech Ministry of Culture.

Jaroslav Kapec (1924–1998) was a painter, an illustrator, a teacher, a preacher, and above all a unique individual whose art is deeply imbued with his own personal philosophy and Christian faith.
His oeuvre straddles the boundary between lyrical abstraction and new figuration. Each of his works represents a personal event, a process that culminates in images – cryptograms. Their form is as complex as their composition, melding figural painting with geometry and letters. They create the impression of a cipher, thoughts concealed from the world, irreal realism. But Kapec also strove to capture on canvas the world he knew – the industrial city and its landscape. He took an imaginative approach, expressing the genius loci of a place rather than painting specific buildings Symbols from the world of things and people give way to dreamlike, disturbing visions – oppressive, yet at the same time magically appealing.
A number of factors – the interpretative challenges posed by Kapec’s work, political upheavals, and personal predispositions – came together and eventually led Kapec to withdraw from public life during the 1970s and work in seclusion; and it was not until the 1990s that his work was publicly exhibited again.

Renata Skřebská