Finding time in his hectic schedule, the chief curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Michal Novotný opened up the National Gallery for the Confrontations group on a Monday evening and gave us a wide-ranging talk in the cavernous space of the Milan Grygar retrospective. Born in 1926, with an enduring interest in contemporary music and its transposition into musical notation, Grygar’s spatial scores appear on canvas, as sculptural installations and as video works. The curator fielded searching questions from the participants on a variety of pressing topics, such as the ideal age for an artist to have a solo show in the National Gallery and the challenges of mounting shows in the enormous spaces of the Trade Fair Palace. He also shared with us the backstory of his Re-Orient series of exhibitions about East European artistic identity, the fourth instalment of which we were to see in Bratislava.

(MRF)