PRAGUE.- Five individual presentations, five independent paths with different starting-points, various progressions and directions at the same time serve as the interpretation key for some other, simultaneously exhibited works. The artists are collectively trying to answer questions on the function of the human body in contemporary art. In their work they reflect on the antic ideals of beauty and medieval symbolism. They touch upon the current projection of nudity with different levels of penetration. Moreover, as women they have to deal with the problematic approach to their own body. Tracey Emin embraced the issue with explicit vehemence on the edge of social conventions. Marlene Dumas, on the other hand, covered her accentuated expressivity with intimate tenderness; Kiki Smith turned towards the fairy allegory and Berlinde De Bruyckere together with Louise Bourgeois engaged with general philosophical motifs such as suffering, memory, loneliness and death.

Berlinde herself finds certain aspects of beauty even in physical suffering: “I want to show how helpless a body can be. Which is nothing you have to be afraid of – it can be something beautiful.”

The intentional double-meaning of the title Flaesh refers to both flesh as in meat and flash as a shot or burst. The artists are being presented to the Czech audience through a series of snapshots of the most important milestones in their carriers and in the history of art in general. Video projections with the takes of artists’ studios, interviews with individual artists and examples of their work are being shown to bring the viewer into a wider context.

The exhibition deepens the dramaturgy of Galerie Rudolfinum. In 1995, the gallery presented for the first time in the Czech Republic a representative exhibition of Louise Bourgeois works. In the same year there has been an exhibition dedicated to the American Kiki Smith focusing on her sculptural work. And in 2011, Marlene Dumas was represented in the group show, Undeniably Me, exploring one’s own identity. The addition of two more names resonating across the art world demonstrates the broadening of the gallery activities.

A catalogue (in Czech and English) with the text by the curator Petr Nedoma has been published to accompany the exhibition.

In the course of the exhibition a broad range of related events will take place