Jiří Hůla

* 1944  †︎ 2022

  • "In addition to recordings of birdsongs, Olga Karlíková also painted sea coasts. It created peculiar lines, based on which we created another assignment. Karlíková designed a similar concrete line for us, which penetrates the ceiling in some places. Jiří Beránek followed, and if we went further into the garden, we would come across Kurt Gebauer. Below stood the wall of Václav Vokolek, who created similar walls made of letters in his paintings. However, our wall was about to fall, and we had to rebuild it. We asked him to make a design, according to which Zdeněk and I implemented it. He supervised it so that everything would turn out as it should. It has openings and letters that are readable to some extent. Inside, there are built-in elements from other buildings, for example, a piece of stairs, a piece of a trough and many other things, which are often made of red sandstone."

  • “I may have already mentioned Dr Zemina. At that time, he worked in Zbraslav, where there was a large depository of things that werwn't allowed to be exhibited in the National Gallery. When one gained his trust, Dr Zemina took him there and showed it to him. So we came to him, and he tested us in a strange way. He pulled out a picture and said, 'This is a nice thing.' It wasn't that nice, and we replied: 'This is nothing.' After a while, he pulled out a Slavík, to which we rightly responded with an astonished: 'Wow!' Finally, he showed us Kolářová. It was a piece made of pierced press studs from the National Gallery. We recognized it and passed successfully. Another significant visit was to Václav Boštík. We also knew Karel Nepraš and used to go to Kučerová's too. Then followed Kratina, Kubíček, Mrázek, Mrázková, Jiří Schmid, Olga Karlíková, but also Janoušek and Janoušková. It was a whole range of people from the older generation, and then our peers or younger authors followed.”

  • “I wrote a cycle of about forty large typescripts, some of them were stylized characters. I wanted to stylize all the letters of the alphabet in a grid of three by five cubes. A, B, C, and so on [pause]. It worked, but there was a problem with the letter M, which had to turn. That's when it occurred to me that it would be interesting to know what all the options are. There was another program for that, called Kit H. After eliminating all symmetries and rotations, the program found nine hundred and thirty-one possibilities for cubes of height three and width five. And because I wrote it spatially, the letters looked like cubes. That's when my brother and I thought of making a material version of it. We created a variable sculpture of nine hundred and thirty-one elements, which I called Kit H."

  • "Suddenly, we realised there was a shortage of gallery space where we could exhibit and that we had the barn. It was in a rather desolate state but it wasn't a lost cause. Two years before, I frequented Nerudovka [Theatre in Nerudovka], where Jiří Beránek had an exhibition. I got to know him. As we sat together talking, I told him about our barn and that there was a rotten beam in it that needed propping up with a post. He said he would do it and that we could rely on it. It took another two years. Finally, in the year eighty-three, he arrived, stayed with us for about three months, and in addition to the column, he also built the floor, stairs and railings. The gallery gradually acquired its shape and concept. When the gallery was completed, we wanted it to be known. At that time, we already had a very extensive directory that I was managing. Jirka Beránek had a great reputation. He was an artist who came to the Czech Republic from Sobotín in Moravia, he did a different type of thing, and people started to be interested in him. He also belonged to the emerging group Dvanáct patnáct [12/15 Late, but still]. So we held a vernissage, sent out invitations and published a large catalogue. A lot of people came, and by that, the gallery launched."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Praha, 16.12.2020

    (audio)
    délka: 02:01:19
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 2

    Praha, 28.01.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 02:04:47
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 3

    Praha, 09.02.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 02:08:53
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

We kept hearing: And why do they do it?

Period portrait of Jiří Hůla, Kostelec nad Černými lesy, early 1980s
Period portrait of Jiří Hůla, Kostelec nad Černými lesy, early 1980s
zdroj: witness archive

Jiří Hůla was born on June 7, 1944, in Prague, but spent his childhood in Kostelec nad Černými lesy, where his father came from and where the family moved when Jiří was three years old. In the mid-1960s, he joined the Faculty of Education of the Palacký University in Olomouc, where he studied mathematics and physical education. Until 1974, he lived in Ostrava and commuted to teach in Hlučín and Opava. At that time, in addition to writing for the local editorial office of Czechoslovak Radio, he began to engage in experimental poetry and collage rearrangement of existing images. At the end of the 1970s, he started working in the Computer Technology Company with Josef Volvovič. They created computer programs that modified inserted poetry or fiction based on a random number generator or other mathematical algorithms in their spare time. At that time, Jiří wrote columns about contemporary Prague exhibitions in Svobodné slovo and Gramorevue magazine. In 1983, together with his brother Zdeněk, they founded Gallery H, located in the church building where they both grew up. Subsequently, several significant authors of the post-war generation and emerging postmodernism exhibited in the alternative space. In 1988, however, the Hůlas discontinued the gallery due to the changing social atmosphere, which no longer required the excessive division of culture into official and unofficial spheres. After the Velvet Revolution, Jiří was very active in the local Civic Forum. In the 1990s, he returned to writing about fine arts. Until recently, he had his own program on Czech Radio. In 2014, he was nominated for the Award of the Ministry of Culture for his long-term contribution to visual arts. Jiří Hůla died on 23rd September 2022.