Fotograf Magazine

April 18 – May 16, 2014

In 2013, the curators Eva and Tomáš Pospěch commemorated the work of Pavel Hečko (b. 1951) with an exhibition in Ostrava’s Fiducia Photo Gallery, entitled Restitution as a Means of Returning Things to their Original State (Restituce jako uvedení věci do původního stavu). For their venture at Fotograf Gallery, they chose not one but two titles, for both in Czech and English the sequence of letters should read the same both from left to right and vice versa. Hence – Neveroddoreven. Mirroring and the phenomenon of the mirror have haunted Hečko’s work for several decades; although naturally mirrors return exactly nothing to its original state. Similarly, old-timers were not served any fare that would live up to the revelations of the artist’s older exhibitions.

For a number of years the artist has receded from the public eye, and could therefore present a challenge to curators of the younger generation. They did not quite succeed in asserting his reputation as a contemplative perfectionist, highly particular about the visual quality of the photogenic images: in many cases, they exhibited mere reproductions instead of authentic prints. Even these nonetheless attested to the fact that Hečko rather made light of strict conceptualism, deliberately desecrating it with a healthy dose of Central European irony.

Josef Moucha