Our Vision
House of Arts Brno is a city gallery designed to present temporary exhibitions of contemporary visual culture. It acquaints the general public with art that is extraordinary in its results, uncompromising in its inner search and able to grasp profoundly significant and often complicated topics that appeal to present-day audiences.
The activities of the House of Arts are based on the creative efforts of professionally educated employees who view their work as their mission and are devoted with extraordinary personal commitment. The democratic, non-manipulative approach to artistic creation and the resulting respect for the creative, artistic act is a necessary condition.
House of Arts Brno runs two exhibition buildings, each with a different programme concept, but complementary to one another.The exhibitions in the main building on Malinovského Square are mainly dedicated to outstanding contemporary artists whose activity is related with the local cultural environment, to projects introducing contemporary culture manifestations of international importance, and to presentations documenting the continuity of modern culture in Brno, of which the House of Arts has constituted an integral part for more than 110 years.
The architecturally valuable, extensive and flexible exhibition space of the main building offers artists a unique opportunity to create holistic monumental installations. Extensive site-specific works such as recent exhibitions by Milan Houser, Václav Jirásek, Federico Díaz, Cheyney Thompson and Sam Lewitt, Pavel Korbička, and Martin Zet, created in immediate response to the aesthetic, historical and social qualities of the exhibition space, are among distinctive specific features of the House of Arts production.
Exhibition projects realized in the historical building of the House of the Lords of Kunštát belong primarily to the sphere of contemporary and experimental work. The BAIR project – Brno Artists in Residence, providing creative scholarships mainly to foreign artists and sending Czech artists abroad, is also based there. Czech and foreign scholarship holders of the House of Arts residency programme are regularly offered opportunities to exhibit in the G99 Gallery, located in the same building.
In addition to exhibitions held in its own venues, the House of Arts organizes and develops long-term projects, through which it deliberately and purposefully interacts with the public space of the city. Among the most important are the Brno Art Open biennial, presenting contemporary works of art in the public space of the city, and the Brno Architecture Manual, a research and popularization project dedicated to modern and contemporary architecture in Brno.
Since 2019, the House of Arts has been implementing a research and popularization project named Archive of the Brno House of Arts and focusing on systematic processing and public availability of the archive that contains documents on exhibition activities from 1947 on. Recent activities include cooperation with the Vašulka Kitchen Brno association, centre for new media art; the House of Arts has been providing it with a location and continuous support.
The House of Arts addresses the professional community as well as the general public by means of an extensive accompanying programme focused on the presentation and popularization of contemporary visual art. In continuous cooperation with primary and secondary schools, the House of Arts organizes a number of educational programmes aimed at mediating the colourful world of contemporary visual culture to children and young people. In cooperation with university teachers, the House of Arts provides facilities for teaching the arts and educational disciplines at Masaryk University and the Brno University of Technology.