Game on the border
5. June 2023We invite you to the opening of the exhibition vladimír kovařík game on the border in the Regional Gallery of Fine Arts in Zlín. The opening will take place on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 at 5 p.m. on the ground floor of building 14. The gallery director Václav Mílek will give an opening speech, curator Vít Jakubíček and Vladimír Kovařík, head of the Product Design studio, will speak about the exhibition.
The exhibition with the subtitle game on the border deliberately presents seemingly contradictory artefacts from the fields of liberal arts (objects, painting and graphics) and applied arts (graphics and product design) side by side without clearly defined boundaries. Despite the diversity of these creative disciplines, a number of common characteristics can be observed, such as the preference for certain color shades, minimalist contrasts, the relationship to geometry and the natural properties of the material. This unconventional scheme thus points to often unexpected examples of their convergence and mutual inspiration, in which there is not even an element of play or exaggeration.
“In contrast to free artistic creation, the work of a designer is bound by a number of rules and norms that shape his work to a certain extent in advance. Therefore, his activity is sometimes literally a game on the border of the conceivable and the possible. Another of the “disadvantages” of a designer’s work is that it often remains anonymous, in the silent service of a purpose, whether it is sales stands, furniture or beverage packaging. Perhaps that is also why it is still unknown to many today, and this exhibition is the first time that this location of Vladimír Kovařík’s activities has been publicly presented. His free work has been successfully presented in the past decades in the country and abroad,” explains Vít Jakubíček, curator of the exhibition at the Regional Gallery of Fine Arts in Zlín. He is the author, for example, of a glass bottle for Kofola and created several designs for beverage packaging, he has been working with the Zubr brewery for more than fifteen years, he designed a logo and book-edited a number of books for the publishing house Host, he designed dozens of sales stands and systems for various clients, he created several designs for Benjamin set of children’s furniture. His design is also commonly encountered by TBU students – from desks, exhibition stands to the current form of diplomas.
From the first sketches to the final solution
The exhibits illustrate the process of creation of products, from the first sketches responding to the customer’s specification, through solution variants, the shape of which is influenced not only by the decision of the designer himself, but also by a whole series of requirements defined during the preparation by the client, production technology, economists and other professions, up to the final production a solution that we, as users, could have encountered in the past.
Vladimír Kovařík’s work is in the field of industrial, product and graphic design with a compelling need to be realized also in the field of free art. “This serves him not only as a means of creative and mental relaxation, but also as a source of inspiration, which is also one of the characteristics close to his generation, which is rather rare among today’s young generation. A number of works contain in their “genetic code” several elements close to designer thinking, be it construction, material, structure or color,” adds Vít Jakubíček.
The exhibition will be on view in the gallery at 14|15 BAŤA’s INSTITUTE until August 20, 2023. A guided tour with the author will take place on June 27 at 5 p.m. More information at www.galeriezlin.cz.
