Jan Zuziak
An Outsider’s Insidership

The first comprehensive, unfortunately posthumous exhibition of the peculiar work of Jan Zuziak (1946–2021) repays the Czech art community’s debt to the unconventional artist, without whom the picture of the Brno art scene of the past forty years would be incomplete and vague. The views that Zuziak brought to the Brno genius loci had cleverly adjusted focuses and angles revealing commonplace topics through quite outstanding ways of representation. He was extraordinary in terms of his engaged worldview and his specific conception of artistic work as reflexive DIY.

The curatorial concept maps all of the artist’s positions and cycles in a diachronic plan, but in natural synchronic correlations – from the early figurative and structural paintings of the 1970s through mail-art projects of the 70s and 80s to the cycles Fireclays and Cries, Scores, Cherries’ Tears and Facebook, which originated after 2010. The collaborative projects Sixty-two Entomological Boxes (2008) and Stamp Designs for Zuziland (2020–2021), in which the artist engaged both professional and non-professional artists, mostly his friends, are also presented. He transformed his own modest dwelling, where he spent the last decade of his life, into an impressive installation, a peculiar cabinet of curiosities dominated by a rich collection of aesthetically arranged natural objects. The exhibition appropriates this authentic environment in the form of a spatial installation, emphasizing the artist’s lifelong credo: to perceive his own art in close connection with life and to be an organic part of his own work.

photo: Michaela Dvořáková