František Drtikol Gallery

The gallery, which is located in the historic building of the Příbram Chateau - Ernestina, holds art exhibitions and organizes concerts and lectures.

In cooperation with the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, a permanent exhibition dedicated to one of Příbram's most famous natives - the world-renowned photographer František Drtikol - has been opened here. He was born in 1883 in Příbram and died in 1961 in Prague.

The exhibition The Inner Child, which we have prepared together with Andros Foros, works with the mirror as a means of looking at past and future selves.

Looking back into the past of our Pribram gallery site, we find ourselves at the Gothic bay window of the office of Archbishop Arnost of Pardubice, where we encounter the origin of the Madonna of St. It still brings pilgrims to the silver altar on the Holy Mountain; the altar that is a great mirror.

Andián Democé's composition "Touches Behind the Mirror" rang in my head when I first considered approaching Andros Foros, who later offered me his series entitled "Mirrors" for exhibition during my first visit to his studio.

As a result of this synchronicity, in our installation of the exhibition, sculptures and visitors wandering through the apocalyptic garden encounter their own image in the pools of tears of the Madonna of St. Mary's, a possible earlier self of Andros' superhero. The embankment of the Příbram heaps is a memory of miners hiding the Madonna of St. Mary's during the Hussite wars, the plague column evokes the natural longing for the miracle of the sick and dying. The sculpture of a Jesuit with a war attribute is as relevant as ever in history. We walk up to it blind, groping in the fog for a miracle.

The analogy of saints and superheroes opens up the question of the search for the supernatural. Foros's characters can invite a very personal intimate confrontation of one's own image in the mirror as well as a societal one. Is the superhero merely a cultural construct or does he embody man's natural desire for transcendent experience? How much do we come to know ourselves and the world around us through rational experience, and how much knowledge is hidden in early childhood?

Andros Foros (1993), whose own name is Jozef Čižmár, is a graduate of the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, Jiří Petrboek's drawing studio; he also attended Jan Hendrych's studio of figurative sculpture and medals and later Vojtěch Míča's studio. He has exhibited in group exhibitions at the DOX Contemporary Art Centre, BOLD Gallery, Moon Gallery, EPo1, Kampus Hybernská and other galleries, and had a solo exhibition at the Kolín City Gallery. Andros Foros is one of the most prominent representatives of the current generation of thirty-somethings in contemporary art.

The exhibition uses the composition "Touches Behind the Mirror" by composer Adrián Demoče (1985).He is played by the Czech Philharmonic, comes from Slovakia, lives in Spain and his music is published by a British label. This is Adrián Demoč, a young composer focused on music of new sonic economy and fragility." Pavel Klusák, Czech Radio

With this exhibition we are opening a series of exhibitions at GFDP in which the personality of the child or childhood will be the dominant theme. We will continue this cycle with another exhibition in June 2025.