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Garbage in, garbage out

A provocative retrospective finds art in piles of trash
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By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
March 28th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Beran's suitcases are like cadavers cut open to expose society's detritus.
If a visitor to Zdeněk Beran’s exhibition exclaimed “What a bunch of junk!” he would be right. Beran, born in 1937, is a cultivator of debris, a connoisseur of ruined materials. A retrospective of his paintings, sculpted assemblages and installations from the late 1950s to the present bring all of this “junk” to light at Veletržní palác.
The show begins with Beran’s earliest works from the late 1950s, efforts in gloomy portraiture and abstract expressionism. Then there is an abrupt shift. His paintings from the early 1960s begin to look like rough skin torn open; they resemble dark wounds on canvas, some of them oozing with pus.
Zdeněk Beran

at Veletržní palác
Ends April 8. Dukelských hrdinů 47, Prague 7–Holešovice. Open Tues.–Sun. 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

This is not an exaggeration. Some of the canvases truly look like pulsing pimples just begging to be popped. Others seem to have actually burst, revealing miscellaneous junk within. Because Beran’s canvases contain so much more than just paint, which can be as thick as a fist in some works, they are really mixed-media assemblages rather than simply paintings.
Near the entrance, strewn on the floor, is a group of old suitcases titled Beran Journey (1980–90), a reassembled installation originally created at the Terezín concentration camp in north Bohemia. The suitcases are painted white and some are wrapped in dirty fleece or pillow stuffing. Some are burned and torn open, looking like cadavers undergoing an autopsy. But instead of revealing intestines and organs their insides are filled with old boots, destroyed books and other miscellaneous artifacts of human life.
Offsetting the somberness of the installation is an amusing detail that may or may not be intentional. Each of the suitcases is tagged with the name of the piece and an archival identification number issued by the Czech Museum of Fine Arts. These were certainly necessary for transportation and installation of the items, but did Beran really intend to identify these dour suitcases like bureaucratic artifacts?
Further down the hall is an untitled installation that consists of a heap of old rusted junk that looks as if it were dragged in from an abandoned building and then wrapped in clear plastic. Next to this is documentation of Beran’s most famous installation from 1970, titled The Rehabilitation Ward of Dr. Dr. Archival photos document the digging of a large hole in the ground, then show it being filled with a bed and other large objects caked in plaster or paint. Finally, the pit is covered with sheets of glass so that viewers can look down into the hole of absurd beauty.
The rest of the exhibit is devoted to Beran’s paintings and sculpted assemblages. His works from the second part of the 1990s are generally thick slabs of paint with other materials worked in — from cotton, dirt clods, glue and angel hair to shreds of paper, dust pans and even men’s boots. Disgusting Structures is the name of a particular series from 1993–95 and certainly one way of looking at all the junk piled on his paintings.
The most experimental paintings of this type include the “Trowel Stroke” series from 1984–90, Strained Macaroni (1986) and Mop (1996), all of which include the named objects.
The exhibition also includes some hyper-real figurative paintings, in particular huge butts with titles like Rear View or Fragment of Painting (Rear View). Some of Beran’s most recent works (from 2005–06) continue with this theme, resembling the enormous exposed buttocks of Sumo wrestlers.
The most evocative works, almost cinematic in effect, are the hyper-realistic paintings from the second half of the 1990s. These include images of tattered inflatable life preservers or inner-tubes, along with two stunning paintings, Rather Downward and Rather Upward (1996–97), which mark a return to unidentifiable moldy debris.
Like the enigmatic American artist Ed Kienholz (1927–94), who re-created full-size garages and other spaces filled with all of life’s accumulated junk to little fanfare during his lifetime — and, more often than not, to the indignation of viewers — Beran is fascinated with the junk cluttering up our lives. His glistening, porous images are both repulsive and attractive at the same time. They are an artist’s visceral interpretation of a literal beauty and beast, combining a mortician’s objective view with more personal meditations on the aging process, decaying flesh and, ultimately, death.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at features@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (28/03/2007):

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