The exhibition at Schick Art Gallery, Skidmore College, provides a brief look at the work of six Czech artists whose generation helped bridge the difficult years that lay between the liberal art scene of the second half of the 1960s and the thaw that eventually came about with the gradual implosion of the Czechoslovak Communist regime in the second half of the 1980s. They are Jiri Beranek, Vaclav Blaha, Jiri Naceradsky, Vladimir Novak, Ivan Ouhel, and Jiri Sopko. The show is supplemented by the work of Pavel Kraus, a Czech-born artist who lives and works in New York and Vermont; he is a contemporary of the other participants. This exhibition features site-specific installations by Jiri Beranek, Vaclav Blaha, and Pavel Kraus.

does not attempt to map out the individual artists' careers, nor the Czech art scene as such. Instead, it seeks to provide viewers with an insight into the work of a number of artists who rose to challenge of dealing with the often brutal and unpalatable questions of life in a country that was for many years stagnated by ideological dogma, a country whose mainstream society was sterilized by the systematic prioritization of mundane material concerns over intellectual ones.

The exhibition " 6plus1" at the Schick Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, USA is open July 15th to September 26th 1999.

contact: kraustudio@aol.com