Pavel Jasanský: Artists and Autographs

Photographer and graphic artist Pavel Jasanský (1938-2021), thanks to his wide-ranging artistic activities (depicted in the ongoing parallel exhibition in the GHMP House of Photography as well as the monograph published by the Archive of Fine Arts), met with many Czech artists working in an enormous range of genres and styles, whom he photographed with unusual and persistent interest during work and leisure. The result is a sizeable section of his photographic archive bearing the lapidary title Artists (Výtvarníci), forming a unique glimpse into Czech art from the 1960s through the 1990s.

The entire portfolio depicts over one hundred Czech artists, both male and female, in the form of portraits, shots of the artists’ studios, reproductions of their artworks, scenes from openings or weddings, or depictions of the authors while at work. The exhibition consists of both a curatorial selection of enlarged contact prints, along with digital enlargements of certain noteworthy fields of negatives. A full archive of “Artists”, numbering over 300 individual contact sheets from photographic film, can be viewed in digital form at the start of the exhibition. 

For the exhibition in DOX, the archive “Artists” is supplemented with a group of original photographs from the unique cycle entitled “Autographs” (Podepsané), which Pavel Jasanský worked on in the final years of his life. This series contains portraits enlarged by the author that were subsequently autographed by the sitters; in return, he gave them a print of the same photograph with his own signature and dedication. Beyond a friendly or collegial gesture, this instance gave rise to a kind of intriguing social experiment.

If the series “Autographs” is essentially a mental mapping of the cultural-social trajectories of Jasanský’s life, the revised series “Artists” reveals the relationships and friendships that enlivened and enriched his creative career, yet in parallel present a vitally important chronicle of Czech art in the final decades of the 20th century.

Pavel Jasanský (1938–2021), during his extensive career as photographer and graphic artist, cooperated with many artists as well as musicians, spanning the genres of document, portrait, or even a radical and intimately personal intermedial fusion. Even during his studies of geology in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he did photographic or typographic work for the upcoming generation of musicians. Later, he worked in the publicity department of the foreign trade corporation Strojexport while in parallel photographing for the Poetic Wine-Cellar Viola, the Prague Ballet Company, and the Theatres Beyond the Gate or On the Balustrade, as well as the literary revue Divoké víno [Untamed Wine]. In 1968, he became a freelance graphic designer and photographer, working on photography and design for record sleeves, posters, or multimedia productions. In turn, during the 1970s Jasanský worked his way up to becoming a highly sought-after photographer of the stars of Czech popular music, yet in the mid-1980s abandoned this work in favour of his increasingly daring independent creative work, reaching into painting, installations, or videoart. After 1989, Pavel Jasanský co-founded the photography agency Signum (J. Kučera, D. Kyndrová, J. Ptáček, J. Vaniš) and opened his own graphic design studio JAGO. In the period 1992–1998, he also led a seminar on multimedia creation at the Prague Film Academy (FAMU).

Curators: Lukáš Jasanský, Jan Kuntoš, Pavel Vančát
Exhibition installation: Jan Kuntoš, Jakub Lang