Robert V. Novák
ALBVM

Although primarily a graphic designer, Robert V. Novák has also been taking photographs since the early 1980s. While his photographs do not often appear in exhibitions, the artist uses them as an important means of recording situations, observations, ideas, feelings – and they sometimes replace the literary form of a message. Up to now Novák’s significant achievements in the field of photography have included an exhibition and book titled Memento mori (a joint project with Ivan Pinkava and Václav Jirásek dating to the mid-1990s) and an exhibition in the Josef Sudek Studio in Prague (2012). The present exhibition is loosely connected to the latter, but has more layers of meaning and visuality.

Robert V. Novák has composed the exhibition ALBVM in Jaroslav Král Gallery from photographs belonging to several thematic wholes showing tangential continuity; at times their meanings loosely overlap, and they are related in a manner of photographic capturing and grasping real situations and phenomena that approaches fiction. Therefore the set does not have the character of a retrospective view of the artist’s photographic oeuvre; an important feature in the selection of thematic sections was the feeling of their inner cohesiveness. The artist has named the individual series Musaion (collections), Landscape, From Art History and Fragments of a Detective Story. Some of them are complemented with thematically related artist’s books – Darksome, containing photographs from Fragments of a Detective Story, and the so-called Dirty Book – Black, connected with the series Musaion. Robert V. Novák comments on the division in thematic sections: …At exhibitions, I like it when I can uncover artists’ ways of thinking myself, not only when looking at individual works, but also at entities composed from them. Primarily, I feel excited by impulses that can appear marginal and seemingly insignificant, but that for me evoke the feeling that I have had a glimpse into a hidden corner where something extra can be found…

The artist has conceived the exhibition especially for the exhibition space of Jaroslav Král Gallery. He has incorporated the spatial arrangement as well as the location’s opening towards the exterior. The window thus becomes a part of the Landscape series: … The window as a framework for a view into another dimension has for me a similar symbolic weight as the mirror, and as one of my key motifs it is now represented here physically, in its material substance, and not in interpretation… (Robert V. Novák) The photographs collected within the set ALBVM share subjective, lyrical photographic interpretation of perceptions, associations and fragments of stories, both real and guessed.