Metaphysics and Despair

The exhibition Metaphysics and Despair presents the recent works of Viktor Pivovarov (1937), complemented by an album he created in 2005. All of the works are being shown at DOX for the first time.

The exhibition is introduced by the album To the Philosopher, Letter No. 3, for which Pivovarov used a booklet created by Daniil Kharms in 1937 (incidentally, the same year the artist himself was born) and reworked it into the specific art form of an album. As was typical of Kharms, the booklet combines absurd humour with serious themes. It deals with what happens to a person if they give in to their basest instincts. A large number of the exhibited paintings are from the series Poets and Muses, which corresponds to a period when Pivovarov was actually surrounded by muses and wrote a set of poems. This somewhat autobiographical cycle presents various forms and paths of inspiration and depicts all the possible hardships and joys associated with the creation of a work of art, be it literary or visual. With insight and specific humour, it shows how complex the birth of these uplifting metaphysical works is and what kind of mental and physical anguish it involves.

At the end of the exhibition we return in an arc to Daniil Kharms. The series Metaphysics and Despair, from which the entire exhibition gets its title, once again portrays what happens when our basest instincts such as greed, hatred, and anger take over – it can even lead to war. The paintings include real newspaper articles chronicling the horrors of the war in Ukraine. It’s as if the metaphysical images are unrelated to the texts, begging the question of whether it is even possible to write poems or paint pictures against the backdrop of these horrific events.

Curator: Máša Pivovarová

Viktor Pivovarov (b. 14 January 1937, Moscow) studied illustration and book design at the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. Since the 1970s he has focused primarily on free creation, working in comprehensive pictorial cycles. Together with Ilya Kabakov he created the distinctive art form of the album, which combines word and image in an original way. Pivovarov also incorporates text into his pictorial cycles or sometimes creates purely textual paintings. He thus became one of the founders of the Moscow conceptualist movement.
Since 1982 he has lived in Prague, where, thanks to both his wife Milena Slavická and Jindřich Chalupecký, he found himself in a similar artistic environment to that of Moscow – that is, the environment of unofficial artists. He became a member of Nová skupina (The New Group), and after the revolution, together with Adriena Šimotová, Václav Stratil, and Milena Slavická, he established and managed the gallery Pi-Pi-Art, which was located in the basement of the Topič Salon on Národní třída in Prague. He also contributed to the design and concept of the magazine Výtvarné umění (Fine Art).
He has had major solo exhibitions at Galerie Rudolfinum (1996), the National Gallery Prague (2021), the House of Arts in Brno (2022), IFA in Berlin (2001), and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2006 and 2011). His works are held in renowned galleries around the world (Tate in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris) as well as private collections.