Arts | All stories

The Czech illustrator Miroslav Šašek produced delightful and evocative books that introduced generations of children to some of the world’s great cities and countries. The fact he spent most of his life in exile has meant that his renown is perhaps greater internationally than in his native country. But in recent years that has finally been changing.

German artist Gerhard Richter has been described as one of the greatest living painters, who left a mark both in the 20th century and continues to push boundaries with his work even now. Without exaggeration, a retrospective of Mr Richter’s work which opened recently at the National Gallery, is the cultural event of the season, a chance to see work of an artist who has oscilated between pure abstraction and photorealism.

Academia Film Olomouc is one of the longest running film festivals in the Czech Republic. What is unique is that this festival, now in its 52nd year, focusses largely on science documentary films. The Future is Now is this year’s motto and it won’t be a surprise that films being screened examine both the promises but also potential risks in fields moving rapidly forward, such as robotics, bioengineering, nanotechnology and of course the big one - artificial intelligence.

Czech Radio has just launched Zhasni!, or Turn the Lights Out!, the station’s first dedicated podcast series. The move is aimed at boosting Czech listeners’ usage of podcasts, a delivery system particularly popular in the US via which subscribers automatically receive audio files – including, of course, radio shows – on their smartphones or other devices. To find out more about this drive I spoke to Edita Kudláčová and Robert Candra from Czech Radio’s Creative Hub group. My first question: What is Zhasni! and how did it come about?

Authors Matěj Černý and Marie Peřinová, partners in real life, worked for three years on a most unusual guidebook mapping Prague’s most curious sites. Entitled 111 Places in Prague That You Shouldn’t Miss, it became a surprise bestseller and will see an English edition later this year.

A new biopic exploring aspects of the life of Jan Masaryk will be the most keenly anticipated Czech-produced film at this year’s Berlinale, which gets underway in the German capital on Thursday. A Prominent Patient depicts the famous politician and diplomat at a low point as the clouds of World War II draw near.

A new exhibition entitled ‘Fear of the Unknown’, previously shown in an earlier inception in Bratislava, opened this week at Prague’s National Technical Library, focussing on the plight of refugees and the discourse surrounding the migrant crisis. The discussion is one which has been highly-politicised and exploited not only by fringe politicians but sadly even by the political mainstream. One of the exhibition’s main aims is thus to show that hate and xenophobia are never the answer – and many of the installations make the point very effectively.

A new book, Fashion Behind the Iron Curtain, released by Olympia and Prague’s Museum of Decorative Arts (UPM) has taken on the task of mapping fashion in Czechoslovakia from 1948 – 1989, a period that followed the Second World War, the Nazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, a brief window of democracy and freedom and itself was marked by 40 years of totalitarian rule.

Czech Games Edition is a small but internationally-respected firm which has published very well-known original board game designs, some of them in as many as 12 languages. Titles include acclaimed party games like Krycí jména (Code Names) or heavier titles like the civ-builder Through the Ages. CGE’s newest release, which got a lot of hype at this year’s Essen Game Fair, was Adrenaline, a game pitting futuristic combatants against each other in a tight arena of rooms. Think proverbial “knife fight in an phone booth”.

The Belda family are famous Prague jewellers who are the only ones certified to oversee the upkeep of the Czech crown jewels; recently, the youngest designer in the family, Viktorie Beldová, made headlines for a crown completed as part of her Masters thesis at Prague’s Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. She was inspired by the story of Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni, who grew up in Prague in the 1960s. Her initial aim was to eventually gift the monarch with the crown, which proved more difficult than expected.