Alen Divis

In the past thirty years, for Czech art Alen Divis (1900 – 1956) has become synonymous with the concept of the artistic outsider. The difficult to classify loner, creator of hallucinatory visions, horror scenes, and passionate religious depictions, is one of the least researched personalities in the world of Czech art, and he remains a man around whom many legends and myths are woven.

Alen Divis spent most of his life abroad. At the end of the 1920s, he made his way to Paris, at the time the capital of modern art. At the beginning of the Second World War he was accused of spying here and spent several months incarcerated in solitary confinement at La Sante Prison. After passing through concentration camps in France, Morocco, and Martinique, he found refuge in New York. He returned to Czechoslovakia in 1947, and during his short time here kindled interest in his work. However, as the Iron Curtain descended after 1948, he found himself marginalized, destitute, and forsaken. At various stages, Divis was influenced by Cubism and Expressionism, and in his own individual way he anticipated Art Brut and Informal painting. His work was primarily based on a powerful preoccupation with existential themes, whether inspired by his own tragic lot or by literature.

This exhibition, the largest ever devoted to Divis, gathers together all his preserved work for the first time. It contains a key cycle of prison walls, illustrations to accompany the ballads of Karel Jaromir Erben and the stories of Edgar Alan Poe, and closes with large-format carbon drawings inspired by the Bible.

To mark the exhibition, the Karel Svolinsky and Vlasta Kubatova Foundation is publishing the first extensive Alen Divis monograph, containing several hundred colour reproductions. This book has been written by Vanda Skalova and Tomas Pospiszyl, who have managed to assemble previously unknown facts about the artist’s life and works.

The exhibition also includes the screening of Martin Reznicek’s documentary Sbohem slunce (‘Farewell Sun’) from 2002, which records the memories of those who met Alen Divis in person.

Pressetext

Alen Divis
Kuratoren: Vanda Skalova, Tomas Pospiszyl