Exhibition Programme of Prague City Gallery for 2025
Planned Exhibitons in 2025
This year, GHMP will present exhibition projects that, as usual, primarily reflect the domestic scene. We will once again focus on monographic exhibitions as well as topics that touch not only on current events in society but also on some of the motifs that link artistic events across history. Tono Stano's exhibition will present his work from many angles while aiming at the most comprehensive picture of his diverse oeuvre to date. His work is not restricted to the body and physicality; it encompasses many other components of visual reality, which he masterfully enriches with updated content and artistic contexts and experimental use of photographic techniques. GHMP is also returning to its previous practice of following the work of an emerging generation of artists in the form of biennials, this time by looking at the theme of gaming as a phenomenon that permeates, as a kind of commonplace, the artistic views of young artists on our scene. Interactive communication with the audience has become a common and growing strategy, adding a welcome and attractive dimension to many projects. A similarly vibrant theme is activism and its various past and current goals, which are insistently present in the expressions of artists of several generations. This is the focus of The Art of Activism project.
The exhibition The Doppelganger, which will close the autumn season, is a large-scale study inspired by the many forms of doubling, but especially by the surge of interest in the concept of the alter ego in Romanticism, from which stems the ongoing attention paid to this now-overused phenomenon – especially due to virtual space. At the House of Photography, we are focusing on two major figures in Czech photography of the second half of the 20th century: Pavel Jasanský, with his somewhat caustic view of socialist era realities, and Dagmar Hochová, whose exhibition revises the established idea of her as a photographer of children and children's games, highlighting her other documentary interests.
The theme of leisure logically belongs to the Troja Château, which is inherently the most suitable place for this purpose. The exhibition entitled The Palace of (Leisure) Time reflects on contemporary forms and possibilities of leisure activities, from sports to a return to crafts and handicrafts. In addition to the exhibition projects, GHMP is offering an extended programme at Troja Château, where, similar to last year, a series of discussions and music events will take place. In addition to the now traditional celebration of the feast of St. Lucy, we will continue to explore other ways to connect this Baroque world with both contemporary visual arts as well as many other cultural experiences that will transcend the boundaries of this location. We are a Prague institution that also operates in the public space, and as part of our responsibility for more than 260 sculptures and objects in the capital, we will restore and reinstate several of them this year in order to protect this precious artistic heritage.
Magdalena Juříková, Director of GHMP
"GHMP is gradually formulating its long-term exhibition programming, the backbone of which consists of thematic projects that revise or expand the existing interpretation of art history. These include the preparation of demanding research projects (Figuration 1958–1972, monographic exhibitions of Josef Václav Myslbek and Jaroslav Čermák, reflections on the art of the 1980s, the influence of works from the National Revival era on the art of the 20th and 21st centuries, etc." says Helena Musilová, Chief Curator of GHMP, commenting on the outlook for the coming years.
GHMP exhibitions in 2025:
ENTER THE ROOM
GHMP Zvon
Dates: 28 March – 14 Sept 2025
Curators: Sandra Baborovská, Martin Netočný
Collaboration on the exhibition: Tjaša Pogačar
Designer of the exhibition: Vojtěch Radakulan
Graphic design: Hoai Le Thi
Enter the Room explores the influence of gaming and storytelling on the visuality of the emerging generation of artists. Today, games are no longer just entertainment; they have become a language, a culture, and an important element of contemporary art. Gaming narratives and aesthetics have permeated various artistic disciplines, creating new ways of thinking about space, time and interaction. The exhibition bridges the physical and digital worlds, transforming the gallery into a game field where the viewer is not just a passive observer but an active participant. Interactive and immersive installations draw the viewer into the story and allow them to experience the artistic encounter firsthand. The Enter the Room project continues the tradition of the Biennial of Young Artists, which was launched at the Stone Bell House 30 years ago, and seeks to provide a space for an emerging generation of artists. The themes that resonate are ecology, possible forms of the future and the role of the individual in a changing world.
Exhibiting artists: Lukáš Prokop, No Fun Kolektiv, Filip Hauer & Philipp Kolychev, BCCA system, Natália Sýkorová, Valéria Dinková, Vojtěch Radakulan, Tomáš Moravanský (Institut Intitut), Herdek collective, Viktor Dedek & Jan Boháč & Jonáš Richter
Berlin guests: OMSK Social Club and artistic duo Eloïse Bonneviot & Anne de Boer
THE PALACE OF (LEISURE) TIME
GHMP Zámek Troja
Dates: 4 April – 29 Oct 2025
Curators: Karla Hlaváčková, Veronika Čechová
An employed person usually spends eight hours a day at work, five days a week. Some of us are engaged in work that fulfils us and we find our identities through it, while others work to secure an income that covers their living costs and allows them to spend their free time in a satisfying way. Just like a worker on the assembly line, urban society that earns its living through office work, finds itself in a situation where its work is only one stage in the 'production' process. Ever since the beginning of the industrial age, society has been addressing the problems associated with the need to regenerate workers so that they not only relax but also satisfy their social and cultural needs and engage in physical activity.
But who can afford to spend their leisure time satisfactorily when leisure time is also becoming a market commodity—a time for consuming services? Do we know how to spend our leisure time idly? Or are we also motivated in our leisure time to produce something, learn something, get as much done as possible, shop, exercise in order to be beautiful and healthy.
The exhibition The Palace Of (Leisure) Time will focus on the theme of spending free time in the context of the Baroque palace, which, at the time of its construction, functioned as a summer palace, a summer residence whose lounges, gardens, hunting preserve and vineyards offered its owners a variety of opportunities to enjoy leisure time. The contrasts that the exhibition would like to highlight are due to the nature of the structure of Troja Château and its gardens. But who can afford to spend leisure time today, and who can afford to spend it satisfactorily? What are the current trends in how we spend our free time? Do we spend it relaxing, or are we all still driven to perform even during moments that are not devoted to activities that secure our livelihoods?
Exhibiting artists: Zbyněk Baladrán, Anna-Marie Berdychová, Johana Hnízdilová, Peter Kolárčik, Eliška Konečná, Monika Kučerová, Judita Levitnerová, Františka Malasková, pingpongping (Anna Vašičková, Hana Kubrichtová, David Stejskal), Nicolas Prokop, Roman Štětina, Eva Volfová, Barbora Zentková & Julia Gryboś, Tereza Zichová
TONO STANO
GHMP Knihovna
Dates: 16 April – 5 October 2025
Curators: Magdalena Juříková, Helena Musilová
Architectural and graphic design: Aleš Najbrt
Tono Stano (born 24 March 1960, Slovakia; living in Prague) is one of the best known photographers working in Central Europe, with extensive connections all over the world. He has developed a distinctive style based on staged photography, but his work also includes very traditional approaches, such as portraiture and landscape photography and installations, as well as highly experimental series and conceptual photography. He is connected to contemporary visual art, which inspires him to new forms of artistic expression.
Tono Stano's oeuvre is very extensive – the retrospective exhibition at the Municipal Library will present works created during his time at secondary school, which are surprising in their openness, inventiveness and sense of cinematic vision, as well as current work, ingenious portraits and works combining both painting and photographic processes. The exhibition is being prepared directly with the artist, giving us the opportunity to explore his archive, to select works he has never previously exhibited, and to view his work from new perspectives. In addition to his non-commissioned works, we will also present works he created for public entities or events: for example, Stano has long collaborated with the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, for which he created an extensive series of portraits of world film personalities, and he also designed the festival’s main prize, the Crystal Globe (2001).
PAVEL JASANSKÝ
GHMP Dům fotografie
Dates: 6 May – 31 Aug 2025
Curator: Pavel Vančát
Co-operation: Jan Kuntoš, Bára Špičáková, Lukáš Jasanský
Graphic design: Lukáš Jasanský
Pavel Jasanský (1938–2021) graduated in geology and took photographs during his studies at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. In his non-commissioned work, Pavel Jasanský distinguished himself as a photographer with exceptional empathy and insight as early as in his Paristory series (1967–1976). He also applied these qualities in his non-commissioned documentary photography, which has long depicted the emotionally charged microworlds of institutions and hospitals, cemeteries and carnivals. Jasanský culminated his documentary work with the extensive cycle New Landscape, New Inhabitants (1985–1990), which could be described as a "subjective documentary", showing in passing the stage of "decaying socialism", often by quoting absurd phantoms of civilisation and media. Here, the trained eye of the photographer and graphic artist works with reality as a collage of fragments and scenes. It is a mesmerising vision of a society at its peak and at the beginning of its fall, a civilisation without people, only with their images and imprints.
The counterpart of Jasanský's documentary work is his multimedia production. The culmination of his intermedia endeavours, in which he has gone further than any other Czech photographer, is probably the first "video sculpture" in the Czech Republic: the enormous installation Spectator (1989), which combines existentially conceived photographic canvasses with added paintings in ink and a sculpture of a seated figure. The figure has a television screen instead of a head, showing the same scenes we see on the canvasses. The final chapter of Jasanský's work is the project Signed Photos (1965-2015). This is a comprehensive album of Jasanský's contemporaries, ranging from family and neighbours to a circle of friends and colleagues to international celebrities. Almost all are consistently signed by the portrait subjects, often illustrating their relationship to the artist.
DAGMAR HOCHOVÁ
GHMP Dům fotografie
Dates: 7 Oct 2025 – 4 Jan 2026
Curator: Jiří Pátek
in cooperation with the Moravian Gallery in Brno
For twelve years, the photography department of the Moravian Gallery in Brno, headed by Jiří Pátek, has been processing the voluminous estate of the important Czech photographer Dagmar Hochová (1926–2012). In 2024, part of this estate was presented at the Moravian Gallery. The retrospective exhibition and the monograph that evaluated this material aimed to update the established image of the artist as a photographer of children —a legacy of the 1980s—and to present Hochová in the light of many other thematic areas that are often related to our national history.
Similarly, the Prague reprise, or rather the Prague version of the exhibition, will present a number of different images with an emphasis on the Prague environment. Visitors will have the opportunity to see reportage from pivotal moments in our history, pictures of important personalities from the domestic cultural and political scene, as well as materials that the artist created on commission for magazines and book publishers, and photographs of art objects that she took for her artist friends.
THE ART OF ACTIVISM
GHMP Knihovna
Dates: 10 Dec 2025 – 8 March 2026
Curator: Jitka Hlaváčková
Co-operation: Vít Havránek, Andrea Hrůzová-Průchová, Oliver Elser, Alice Koubová, Martin Nitsche, Megan Hoetger, Zuzana Štefková, Nicola Baird, András Kenyi and others.
Graphic design of the publication and exhibition: Von Saten
Spatial design of the exhibition: Jan Ševců (OmlouvámeseparDón studio)
The exhibition The Art of Activism explores protest and engaged art in the Czech Lands, especially after 2008 (in the context of international movements such as Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Women Life Freedom, Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, etc.). Significant space is devoted to foreign initiatives, especially those that form the immediate political and inspirational context of the local art scene.
The project explores the relationships between the individual and the local-global society, between solidarity and active engagement, the artwork and its social transcendence. It explores the ways in which artistic strategies are involved in the broader context of protest activities and movements, and reflects on the most significant concepts of basic human rights and social justice in artistic work.
Perhaps for the first time in the Czech context, the exhibition and its catalogue attempt to comprehensively grasp the issues of activist art, from its visual presentation to art historical analysis. The concept of the exhibition is based on the important, though still little reflected in our country, tradition of art historical research on social activism, as explored by art theorists such as Suzanne Lacy, Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel, Judith Butler and others.
THE DOPPELGANGER
GHMP Zvon
Dates: 14 Nov 2025 – 5 April 2026
Curator: Kristýna Jirátová
Designer of the exhibition: Tomáš Džadoň
Graphic design: Jana Vahalíková
The exhibition will present, through a diverse selection of both Czech and foreign artworks and in the context of literature, psychology and philosophy, the phenomenon of the doppelganger. The theme of the double has occupied the human mind since ancient times, when the double was identified with the soul of a person or served as a representative of the deceased on earth and was thus a guarantee of immortality. In folk narratives and fairy tales, meeting one's own double became a harbinger of approaching death, and seeing oneself thus came to be regarded as an evil omen. Fundamental to the creation of the phenomenon of the double as we view it today was 19th century Romanticism and the figure of the doppelganger - the doubled, often malevolent self. We can also encounter the doppelganger in the form of a mirror image or shadow that becomes increasingly independent until it begins to oppress its "original" and eventually takes its place. The question of identity associated with duality– original/copy, reality/virtuality – has been gaining in intensity since the invention of photography and film, and in the contemporary world of technology, the double, emancipating itself from the phantasmal, has assumed posthuman dimensions in the form of virtual beings, clones, cyborgs and other artificial duplications of humans.
ART FOR THE CITY 2025
As part of its role as the city's curator of art in public space and as the expert guarantor of the Art for the City programme, GHMP is preparing a series of art projects and installations that build on the proven formats of previous editions of Art for the City, including outdoor exhibitions, art festivals in public spaces, and new, large-scale murals. Within the framework of the Art for the City project in 2025, we will continue our traditional cooperation with other city institutions and stakeholders such as Dopravní podnik, a.s., TSK, IPR, TCP, PCT, Exhibition Grounds and districts of the city.
Upcoming artistic realisations and interventions in the public space of the city:
Hommage to Stanislav Kolíbal – 100 years
In the autumn months, an outdoor dialogue will be organised between artworks by contemporary artists and Kolíbal's public sculptures and architectural elements. The exhibition of artworks selected by the curatorial team in the public space around Vyšehrad station will include not only art installations but also a festival of artistic interventions and activities of an ephemeral nature.
As part of the jubilee year, an outdoor work by Stanislav Kolíbal will be prepared for installation at Mariánské náměstí at the end of 2025.
Labyrinth Troja, St. Lucy
Dates: 12 –13 Dec 2025
The main aim is to show the multiple uses of this historically rich site, and to enhance the perception of the Chateau's impact on the development of the site and its new role as a community eco-centre in the 21st century through interactive artistic interventions that will bring the public together, activating and engaging them in collective activities. We are creating an imaginary bridge between art and the landscape by exhibiting temporary artworks and staging art events around the Château that can oscillate between ephemeral interventions, land art, performative art formats and scientific interpretations of the landscape using natural and human sciences. The third annual St Lucy lights festival on 12–13 December 2025, will light up the winter gardens of Troja Château for the general public.
Lost & Found
Kobka 17
Dates: 26 June – 27 July 2025
An exhibition featuring a joint project between GHMP and the Academy of Sciences focused on technological research into endangered mosaic artworks. Research into the binders and materials of historic mosaics is an essential step towards their restoration and, in many cases, their rescue at the last minute. The exhibition will present the project to transfer the monumental mosaic Orchids by Jitka and Květa Válová.
Synapse
Dates: October–November 2025
An exhibition of objects and installations using lighting designed by the young artist Jan Poš. He won the competition of the GHMP and the Prague Public Transport Company for a light object in the underpass at Florenc. The work Synapsis will be implemented in 2026.
It is also becoming a tradition to collaborate with the Holešovice Market, where, after the successful installation of the Raft by Adam Kovalčík, an open call for an artwork with the theme Memory of the City will be announced for the same location to mark the 130th anniversary of the opening of the Holešovice Market. Implementation is expected in the second half of 2025.
Now in its fourth edition, the Rock, Paper, City conference will focus on exploring the initiatives and stimuli for new permanent works of art and memorials within the city. The conference, entitled TO WHOM, TO WHAT?, will explore what themes, events and personalities should be commemorated in public spaces. Who determines these? How should competitions for public art be commissioned?