Milan Kozelka
On the Road

The artist and author Milan Kozelka (1948‒2014) left an indelible mark on Czech art, mainly in the 1980s and 90s. In the 1960s he devoted himself to poetry and his poems are today placed in the context of the Czech beatnik movement. From the 1970s Kozelka became involved in action art. He drew attention to himself primarily through the series Contacts, which he created at the beginning of the 1980s in the Bohemian Forest. His extreme body actions (during one of them he suspended himself in the white water of the Hamerský stream) are an important contribution to the history of Czech body art. In the 1970s and 80s he simultaneously developed his visual art creations in the form of conceptual drawings or land-art installations. Kozelka always followed current events and his restlessness drove him to more actions, often of a political nature.

The preparation and organisation of Milan Kozelka's exhibition, which will provide a broad evaluation of his versatile, remarkably authentic and simultaneously contradictory work, has been a joint project of several galleries (Brno House of Arts, Gallery of Fine Arts in Cheb and Ústí nad Labem House of Arts). The exhibition is accompanied by the monographic publication Svázáno do Kozelky (which might loosely translate as Tied Limbs) by the Větrné mlýny publishers. It shows for the first time Milan Kozelka and his work in its entirety as a multimedia and conceptual artist, performer, poet, prose writer and initiator of diverse activities. The presentation at the House of the Lords of Kunštát will be unique in making public documentation of some of the previously unknown body-art and land-art works alongside other documents preserved in the archive of Kozelka’s friend and collector Vladimír Meistr. In addition, it will highlight the political and environmental aspect of Kozelka's work. The example of this multifaceted personality can be used to reveal the totalitarian period in all its complexity and ambiguity and show the defiance and fragility of an individual facing the power pressures of society.