KEP is an abbreviation for the Chamber of Educators (Komora Edukačních Pracovníků), which is part of the Council of Galleries of Czech Republic and has been operating within this organization for 17 years. Just as the directors and curators of Czech galleries meet regularly, so do the educators. The name educator in culture is understood as the one who educates, in our case in an art gallery or museum. Meetings take place regularly, every year in two to three different galleries, as stated in the statutes of the Council. These meetings are often very beneficial for all members of KEP.

Interview with sculptor (architect) * and graphic artist Jiří Příhoda

We met Jiří Příhoda in the Jihlava gallery, when he was preparing the visual style of the exhibition by Adriena Šimotová and Jiří John. This was followed by work correspondence and communication by e-mail (graphics for the Jihlava exhibition were created across the Atlantic). The demanding exhibition project was interrupted by the first anti-pandemic measures. The situation has changed and has not changed since the spring of 2020. Correspondence also takes place between two continents, with the difference that Jiří Příhoda has been spending a year in lock-down, as is already said in the Czech lands. "Now I am more worried about you at home," writes Jiří Příhoda in one of the March e-mails, "What the hell is going on there?" The world's media reflect the culminating epidemiological situation in our country.

One of the most important parts of the OGV collection in Jihlava, and thus its permanent exhibition, is the numerous collection of paintings of Group 42, whose members in the 1940s were the rising generation of young artists focused on the poetics of contemporary technical civilization. In addition to the works of František Hudeček, Kamil Lhoták, František Gross or Jan Smetana, the youngest member of the group, an important representative of Brno's post-war painting of the 20th century, Bohumír Matal, is also represented here.

The melancholic girl (she is undated, but she can be included in the works from the 1960s) is painted with tempera on cardboard, Stritzka's favorite technique. The painting shows a modern young lady (with a pink necklace) in the middle of an unspecified baroque garden or park (stylized decorative vases) looking nostalgically into the vault of trees and shrubs. It is a confrontation of youth with the past tense and the inertia of nature - the historical and natural surrounding half-figure is intertwined with a stylized drawing in a kind of forest - an element.