Josef Šíma. In-Between Worlds

Josef Šíma (1891–1971) returns to the Gallery of West Bohemia’s exhibition halls after almost sixty years. The current exhibition references his first exhibition with designs for stained glass windows from the 1960s, which also represent a temporal link to the painter’s beginnings in France. During that period, he found himself in a different world, and his work began to respond to new visual and intellectual stimuli. However, Šíma did not subscribe to any of the dominant trends of the time; he transcended all of them in some way. He freely combined the avant-garde art with traditional approaches, formal artistic experimentation with literary references or philosophical ideas, concrete views with universal questions, and serious art with humour and banality.

The title of the exhibition, Mezisvěty (In-Between Worlds), refers to the clash and intermingling of different influences in Šíma’s work. First and foremost, his artistic language was transformed by the international artistic community in Paris, represented especially by Max Ernst, Piet Mondrian, Giorgio de Chirico, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes and Pierre Jean Jouve. These stimuli were further fuelled by Dadaist impulses linked to popular culture and poetry, and all this was supported by inspiring friendships with poets and theoretical reflections on the structure of poetic language – Šíma discussed the latter with the linguist Roman Jakobson during his visits to Prague. Jakobson’s detailed analyses of poetic language and his examination of interrelationships – especially his interpretation of seemingly illogical connections and layers of meaning – were directly reflected in the structure of Šíma’s paintings. Moreover, as the exhibition publication demonstrates, they provide an appealing opportunity to observe, compare, and interpret Šíma’s works in new ways. 

In addition to Šíma’s seminal paintings and drawings, the exhibition features works by other notable figures from the Czech and international art scenes of the time, including Jindřich Štyrský, Jan Zrzavý, František Kupka, Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico.

The exhibited works have been loaned by around two dozen important Czech public and private collections, including the National Gallery in Prague, the Moravian Gallery in Brno, the Gallery of the Central Bohemian Region in Kutná Hora, Prague City Gallery, the Museum of Czech Literature, the Aleš South Bohemian Gallery in Hluboká nad Vltavou and the Gallery of Modern Art in Hradec Králové, as well as foreign collections, such as the Centre national des arts plastiques (housed by the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Reims, France) and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany.

Alena Pomajzlová, the author of the exhibition concept, lectures at the Seminar on Art History at the Masaryk University in Brno, where she focuses on Czech modern art in the international context. Other contributors to the exhibition include Roman Musil, the director of the Gallery of West Bohemia in Pilsen; Markéta Theinhardt, professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, who specialises in Czech and French art and has previously worked primarily on the work of František Kupka; and Tomáš Glanc, professor at the University of Zurich, who has elaborated the influence of Roman Jakobson’s analyses of poetry on Šíma’s work.

The exhibition is held under the auspices of the Minister of Culture of the Czech Republic, Martin Baxa.

The main media partner of the exhibition is Czech Television.