Ji Anderle / Batrachomyomachy

Frog-Mouse Wars and Other Petty Tussles

Paintings, Prints and scultures !"#"-$%%"
Ji Anderle is an artist whose work primarily stands out by its ability to percolate into the
intellectual and expressional richness of mankind. He focuses on the deepest recesses of our
common inheritance and forms works of art from the innumerable conscious and
subconscious images in which the past and present, dream and reality meet. The result is
impressie metaphors on human life and its complicated spectrum of morality, character traits
and experiences.
The extensie and aried works that Anderle created oer more than fifty years include
graphic sheets, pictures and plastic arts. Throughout all this ariety of forms and techni!ues
we can perceie in Anderle"s expression the common denominator of critical humanistic
ision assessing specific historical phenomena and normal human themes, this being through
grotes!ue metamorphoses during which the human body becomes a tangible metaphoric
embodiment of the internal nature. #ne of the most important aspects of Ji Anderle"s work is
the constant inspiration by primary cultures, which were, until recently, labelled primitie.
This inspiration proides his expression, which otherwise stems from the rationally based
renaissance traditions, with a dark and intuitie counterpoint. The mutual interplay between
displays of cultiation and wildness, circumspection and spontaneity, self$control and temper
$ it forms a tension that determines Anderle"s artistic signature. This tension, often lending his
pictures an uneasy energy, rises from the eternally changing balance between these poles.
%ince his arrial on the &'ech arts scene in the mid ()*+"s, in the framework of a return to
figuration, Ji Anderle has ac!uired an utterly uni!ue place not ,ust at home but in an
international context too.
His works are found in the collections of a number of &'ech and world museums and galleries
-for instance the .ational /allery in 0rague, Albertina, &entre /eorges 0ompidou, %tedeli,k
1useum, The 1useum of 1odern Art in .ew 2ork, and the 1etropolitan 1useum of Art3.
The exhibition prepared for the &ity /allery 0rague presents a cross$section of the author"s
graphics, paintings and statues, with an emphasis on the 4eternal4 theme of inter$human
conflict played out at the existential leel and the embarrassingly banal leel.