fragilités :

with Luboš Plný and Anna Zemánková

Event From October 20, 2022 to January 8, 2023

view of the exhibition *fragilities*, Rudolfinum Gallery, Prague, 2022 - © © Galerie Rudolfinum, photo : Martin Polàk, christian berst — art brut

Luboš Plný and Anna Zemánková are featured in the exhibition fragilités at the Rudolfinum Gallery (Prague), until January 8th 2023.

Fragility has emerged in recent years as a key concept through which to reimagine both human and ecological conditions. The exhibition fragilités unfolds the concerns, visions, and sensibilities expressed by artists who have engaged deeply with fragility and reflected on its tensions, complexities and paradoxes. The traditional meaning of fragility – weakness, powerlessness, passivity – is challenged, and claimed instead as a source of force and agency that encourages sustaining interdependencies.

The understanding that all living things are dependent on their environment and each other has intensified in the context of current crises. These ideas have already been developed by artists and thinkers who have for many years stressed the invisible bonds that link us to other beings, and the myriad ways in which we are entangled with wider ecosystems. In response to these ideas, the exhibition invokes fragility as a lens and language, claiming that neither vulnerability nor power come in expected guises, and that the fragile connections between bodies and the earth constitute real strength.

With artworks by : Francis Alÿs, Michael Armitage, Maria Bartuszová, Bianca Bondi, Louise Bourgeois, Geta Brătescu, Edith Dekyndt, Susanna Fritscher, William Kentridge, Kapwani Kiwanga, Dominik Lang, Luboš Plný, Anri Sala, Vivian Suter, Alina Szapocznikow, Barthélémy Toguo, Anna Zemánková.

Curated by Elena Sorokina and Silvia Van Espen.

Galerie Rudolfinum

Artists

Luboš Plný

Luboš Plný whose international recognition was confirmed by his selection in the 57th Venice Biennale titled Viva Arte Viva (curated by Christine Macel) in 2017. As the first outsider artist acquired by the MNAM in 2013, he has enjoyed numerous institutional exhibitions in recent years. These include exhibitions at contemporary art museums in Kobe and Hiroshima, Japan, at the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, at the Kunsthalle in Dresden, and in his hometown of Prague. In 2017, the Dox Art Center dedicated a solo exhibition to him, and in 2022, the Rudolfinum facilitated a dialogue between him and artists such as Louise Bourgeois and William Kentridge. In September 2023, we dedicated a solo show to him in our two spaces, a monography and a performance at the Beaux-Arts de Paris.

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anna zemankova - © christian berst — art brut

Anna Zemánková

It was at the beginning of the 1960s that this humble Moravian woman began creating works, strikingly responding to impulses from the depths. At dawn, she would mentally gather flowers “that grow nowhere else,” making them emerge from the paper.
Anna Zemánková is an established figure of outsider art, to the point that she was honored in 2013 at the Venice Biennale before a significant collection of her works joined the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Mumok.
In 2023, the gallery presented her in a solo show at Art Basel Paris, and the following year Adriano Pedrosa, curator of the Venice Biennale, exhibited a group of her works. In 2026, the Hermès Corporate Foundation in Brussels subsequently presented eight of her drawings.

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