Diogenes’s Barrel

Jiří Příhoda entered the Czech art scene in the early 1990s and quickly established himself as one of the most distinctive artists of his generation. His work is characterized primarily by spatial installations drawing on the structural vocabulary of architecture and site-specific interventions in architecture. A significant part of his early work also consists of video installations in which he manipulated well-known Hollywood films in postproduction. In 1997 he received the Jindřich Chalupecký Award. Alongside his own artistic practice, he taught for many years at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where from 2005 to 2015 he headed the Studio of Monumental Art, later renamed Intermedia 2. He currently works primarily in the United States. Příhoda’s installations often take the form of small dwellings situated in public spaces - a sort of habitable sculpture intended for personal isolation, concentration, and reflection. At other times, he radically transforms the interiors of exhibition halls and other architectural spaces. His work is characterized by a blurring of the hierarchy between the front and back sides of architecture: Sometimes the interior of a building may be completely inaccessible to the viewer, and attention is focused solely on the rough exterior structure; at other times, a sort of interior within an interior emerges, whose reverse side functions as an autonomous sculptural form that can be entered as if it were a second interior. The work Diogenes’s Barrel is a composition of four framed drawings that were presented at Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague in Příhoda’s largest solo exhibition to date. The drawings depict various forms and shapes that the artist has incorporated into small-scale architectural installations realized in various locations around the world. They were fully reflected in the installation Diogenes’s Barrel, built in 2018 in the Italian Dolomites as part of the 6th Biennale Gherdëina.

80 % of the hammer price is allocated to support the non-profit foundation  Spolu s odvahou, a member of the Bátor Tábor family