Prague Spring Art Salon 2025
A time for music, experiences, emotions, and encounters. This year’s festival theme resonates not only through music but also through visual art. To mark its 80th anniversary, Prague Spring, together with curator Jan Kudrna, invited six contemporary Czech artists (Michael Rittstein, Rony Plesl, Anna Neborová, Josef Bolf, Martin Krajc and Jakub Tomáš) to create works on the theme of time.
Between 12 May and 3 June, visitors attending concerts at the Municipal House and the Rudolfinum will have a unique opportunity to view original works by six leading Czech artists. These works will be auctioned on 25 May during the 93rd auction of Galerie KODL at Žofín Palace and on Artslimit.com. All proceeds from the hammer prices will be used to support and develop the Prague Spring Festival.
Curator’s Note: TIME TO STOP
Time may be perceived as linear or cyclical. What they share are its relentlessness, precision, and finality. Prague Spring, an extraordinary event on our cultural scene, celebrates its jubilee this year — its eightieth edition. A cyclical element within the linear flow of time. This year’s six invited artists have approached the theme of time in entirely free and individual ways. Each differently, yet in a certain sense together. Jakub Tomáš explores the moment of multiplying an initial figure into a temporal sequence, depicting the character at several consecutive moments in one timeframe. Anna Neborová conceives time as a flowing current that transforms a concrete, functional element of the past into a relic and object of the present. Martin Krajc composes references to time and history into a kind of colourful semi-kaleidoscope, joining them into a unified visual whole. Michael Rittstein personifies the linearity of time as a fast-moving racing car — yet, with his typical grotesque allegorical character, he places the entire situation in relative perspective. Rony Plesl addresses the theme of time in a strictly cyclical sense: the vase becomes a space where a flower fulfils its visual function until it physically decays and is then replaced by a new one. Finally, Josef Bolf’s work is based on a deep personal sediment of time, drawing from memory records of his childhood and adolescence.
Jan Kudrna
How were the works for the Prague Spring Art Salon 2025 created? Take a look into the studios of Rony Plesl and others
Josef Bolf: Future Past
The environment of the housing estates also influenced the work of Josef Bolf, an artist known for his painting and drawing, who grew up on the outskirts of Prague. His paintings and drawings can be found in the National Gallery, public museums, and private collections. Bolf’s work is founded on strong themes of nostalgia, melancholy, and a certain exploration of the sediment of his own memories and experiences — among them recollections of the ‘normalisation’ era housing estates and the urban atmosphere of that time. For the Art Salon theme, he chose to approach his piece Future Past in a slightly different way from the other artists, working not with linear time but rather with cyclicality, often associated with myths or scientific theories. “I found it appealing,” he says. He describes his artistic process as being guided by fleeting inspiration, drawing upon his unique personal experiences. Although Bolf predominantly listened to underground music in his youth, he now finds inspiration for his work in ambient compositions.
2025, signed on the reverse
Oil on canvas
70 × 55 cm
Starting price: CZK 140,000
Estimate: CZK 200,000–300,000
Martin Krajc: Time
A composition made up of a sculptural group, a watch, a concert grand piano, colourful patches and planes — all assembled into a visual kaleidoscope and underlined by the dynamism and energy of Martin Krajc’s painterly style — can be seen in the painting Time. “I approached the commission as a kind of tribute to Bedřich Smetana, with whom a dialogue emerges in the painting. In creating the piece, I used a time-based method of layering themes over each other,” Krajc describes his approach to incorporating this year’s festival theme. Krajc’s earlier work was connected to the hip-hop scene, where he often painted breakdancers and enjoyed breakdancing himself. Today, through his popular-pop language, he engages in expressive abstract painting. His main goal is to ensure that viewers are never bored when looking at his work.
2025, signed on the reverse
Acrylic, oil pastel, charcoal on canvas
120 × 140 cm
Starting price: CZK 150,000
Estimate: CZK 200,000–300,000
Anna Neborová: Little Horse
Deconstructing light, arranging objects within a space without clear spatial dimensions, and creating an impression of magical reality at the boundary of dreamlike realism — these elements are present in Little Horse by painter Anna Neborová. The theme of time also appears in her work, though expressed in an untypical way. She particularly enjoys exploring the space between abstract and figurative painting. “My subjects are usually things that surround me. I often find inspiration close by,” she explains. Toys — whether wooden, plastic, or plush — often serve as her models. For this painting, she chose an old rocking horse whose contours blur and blend into the background. “This shift can take us back to childhood, when there was plenty of time for everything,” she concludes.
2025, signed lower left
Oil on canvas
100 × 120 cm
Starting price: CZK 70,000
Estimate: CZK 120,000–160,000
Rony Plesl: Translucent
The only non-painting work at this year’s Art Salon is a unique vase made of cut uranium glass by the renowned sculptor and designer Rony Plesl, created in collaboration with Lasvit. The object, titled Translucent Vase, was even listed among the hundred greatest icons of Czech design of the past century. “I try not to create too many pieces, and this vase fits that approach — only six were made,” says Plesl, adding that the vivid green colour symbolises spring. For him, the essence of time is intertwined with cyclicality. Plesl’s work is founded on a personal fascination with visual art, exquisite craftsmanship, and a constant search for the limits of his own creativity, materials, and techniques.
2025, signed on the base
Object (hand-blown, cut and polished uranium glass with wedge cuts)
height 47 cm
Starting price: CZK 80,000
Estimate: CZK 120,000–180,000
Michael Rittstein: Vegetable Carts
Martin Krajc’s teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague was Michael Rittstein, one of the foremost figures of expressive figurative painting and another distinguished artist featured in this year’s Art Salon. The style of this legendary Czech painter is founded on gesture, colour, painterly skill, and the use of irony and grotesque humour. He often tells banal or marginal stories, elevating them into vivid visual experiences. An example is Vegetable Vehicles, the painting created for Prague Spring, which depicts genetically modified vegetables. Rittstein most often paints in Brnířov near the Šumava mountains, occasionally using a local tractor-wash facility to work on larger pieces. For him, the most important elements in painting are the energy of colour and brushstroke, as well as maintaining contact with surrounding reality. “My painting is more of an apology to classical music for the mischief I caused as a child at educational concerts, from which I was often removed,” he says with a smile, adding that he now listens to rock music from morning till night, only occasionally venturing into the world of classical music.
2023, signed lower right
Acrylic on canvas
50 × 70 cm
Starting price: CZK 250,000
Estimate: CZK 300,000–400,000
Jakub Tomáš: Time
A spatio-temporal sequential composition capturing the interweaving of the artist’s own childhood with that of his daughter, represented through a figure wandering a socialist-era housing estate — such is the essence of Time by Jakub Tomáš, a key figure among the middle generation of contemporary Czech artists. In recent years, Tomáš has been gaining recognition, particularly in the United States and Western Europe. He demonstrates a remarkable ability to work with the relationship between form and content, placing figures into situations that are strongly influenced by their surrounding contexts. In Time, a figure passes through the painting in several phases of motion. Tomáš relativises the notion of time and “binds” it into a sequence of imaginary film frames, allowing the figure to travel across the canvas in a separate yet clearly interconnected and authentic form, seemingly without a defined goal or purpose. “Its identity changes at each stage, but it is always the same person,” the artist explains, noting that the model for the painting was his daughter.
2025, signed on the reverse
Oil on canvas
125 × 100 cm
Starting price: CZK 60,000
Estimate: CZK 80,000–120,000
