Exhibition: Something and something

Date: 29.5. - 29.6.2025

We cordially invite you to the opening of the exhibition, which will take place on 29 May at 7 pm.

In the previous two exhibitions of the 1+1 series, Beseder Gallery presented two pairs of artists whose relationship was that of teacher and pupil. In the first case, it was Jiří Černický, who worked for a long time at UMPRUM, and his student Filip Dvořák. Their works were a direct marriage, as they were fixed directly on each other. Alena Anderlová from the second pair is also a former graduate of Antonín Střížek from the Academy of Fine Arts. Their installation was conceived more as a complement, a complementarity of two essentially painterly approaches.

The authors of the new exhibition SOMETHING AND SOMETHING are two artists who until recently did not know each other. The fact that PETR NIKL and PETR PELZMANN met at a joint exhibition is essentially a coincidence. It is not even a relationship between teacher and pupil. They both create unique works, immersed in their separate worlds.

Petr Nikl is no newcomer to the Czech art scene, he has been on it for 40 years. In the 1980s he exhibited at the so-called Confrontations, and co-founded the Tvrdohlaví art group. He is sometimes considered the most versatile artist, as he works in the fields of visual art, music, literature/poetry and theatre/performance. He has received awards in both the visual arts (Jindřich Chalupecký Award) and literature (Magnesia litera). He has released several albums, designs and produces his own musical instruments, creates puppets with which he performs in poetic theatre performances.

Petr Nikl's creative principles are freedom of expression, playfulness, openness, receptivity to unconventional approaches and the blending of media, rich imagination and a certain sophistication. All this is reflected in Peter's artistic expression. He draws pictures for children, sets for his performances, paints flowers and natural artifacts, poetic abstraction, surrealistic scenes and historicizing portraits.

By contrast, Petr Pelzmann, a generation younger, who is still at the beginning of his artistic career, is of a different temperament. He paints vividly, with rich colours and strong brushes, as if he wanted to tell the world something fundamental, as if he wanted to compulsively speak out of something that may have weighed on him in the past or still does... His figurative art, his portraits, are close to rough and simple art brut. His relationship to Petr Nikl can best be described by the term CONTRASTIC. And that is what this exhibition is about.

Petr Nikl (* 8 November 1960 Gottwaldov) is a Czech painter, illustrator, writer, musician and theatre artist. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Jindřich Chalupecký Award (1995), the Magnesie Litera in the categories of Book of the Year and Book for Children and Youth (2008), as well as three Ministry of Culture awards for "The Most Beautiful Book of the Year" (1997, 2001 and 2002). His books have been published abroad, including in French, English and Italian.

Petr Pelzmann was born in 1988 and is an autodidact in his artistic endeavours. He did not finish the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art in Pilsen and decided to go his own way. His work is characterized by the deconstruction of the figure in a distinctive painterly handwriting, where he develops the possibilities of new figuration and tries to capture the essence of the subject in its elementary form.

The exhibition is curated by Miroslav Krupička.

Free admission.

Come and have a look, we are looking forward to it!