Prague

Last monday, tuesday and wednesday I spent in Prague at the apartment of a friend. I had been there already last year, so I had seen all the famous tourists sights already. I decided to focus on art galleries as I had liked those I had visited in Berlin, and Prague has quite a lot of those.




It was interesting to see the contrast between Berlin and Prague. Prague is obviously a lot nicer, with loads and loads of original, beautiful buildings. Not as cosy as our Bruges, but very nice. Different also were the ludicrous amount of tourists in prague, streets and bridges full with them. A digital photo is taken every two seconds in a space of two metres around you, wherever you are. Different also is the music: where Berlin is all about electronic music Prague is all about classical music, which kind of fits the respective architecture in the cities.

I visited the Kafka museum as well, which was nice but is very overhyped and has lots of design flaws.

The most interesting art galleries I visited were:

The rudolfinum (first picture in this post). This is one of Pragues main concert halls and in the side is a nice art gallery, which now has an extensive exhibition of work of one of the most famous contemporary German painters: Georg Baselitz. The building is very nice inside with tall ceilings and lots of decoration.
The exhibition was chronologically ordered, which made it interestig to see how the painter evolved in his long career. The sudden move to his trademark upside-down painting was funny, as for a short moment I was wondering if I was really the only one seeing this painting was hanging upside down - until I realised all the rest of the paintings were like this.
Pictures underneath come from the rudolfinum website and that's what the gallery looks like. Gives an impression of how the building looks inside as well.
In the rudolfinum I found a leaflet, "Artmap" which listed all the contemporary art galleries in prague on a handy map together with a short description. Very practical.









Right next to the rudolfinum (in terms of niceness/interestingness) comes the Museum Kampa, on the banks of the Moldau with view on the Charles Bridge. The museum houses a big and diverse private contemporary art collection, open to the public. There are special exhibitions as well, although I sadly missed the Cobra exhibition which closed at the end of september. The building itself has artistic touches as well, with a nice glass roof terrace and a row of light-emitting orange penguins on the water (Charles Bridge visible too on the picture at the left). Anyway, very interesting museum, not too expensive and you can easily spend a couple of hours there.

The last day I went to the house of the golden ring, where I visited the exhibition on Karel Teige, a famous and very ahead-of-his-time cover/poster designer, starting with über-minimal-functional book covers like the picture underneath in the centre (picture from abaa.org, where an original version of this book sells for 5500 dollar) and in the end making surrealistic collages like the picture on the right.











Other galleries I visited are the Manès gallery, which wasn't too interesting (the building itself quite run-down too) but was cheap as well. I also went to the Vice gallery, which turned out to be a small (ten picture) exhibition of photos of Norwegian Black Metal. Weird stuff, took a free (Chech) vice magazine with me. Turns out there are vice galleries all over the world, even one in Antwerp.

Ended up buying some books as well, as Prague has a lot of small english-language bookshops often selling cheap second-hand books as well.

This is my last blog post since I'm already for a couple of days in good ol' Belgium again (took a wizzair plane back). See ya.