Kristián Suda (selection from the book Jiří George Erml: Collected Bars / New York 1990–1994)
8. 10. 2012
The creators of the monograph will discuss at Leica Gallery Prague. Screening of the documentary film about Jiří George Erml named “Prístavné záležitosti” (director Dušan Trančík) will be part of the discussion.
On Monday, October 8th, 2012 at 7 p.m.
The discussion is free of charge; reservation required (e-mail: ik@lgp.cz)
“… Although Erml‘s artistic creations from the second half of his life looked at many different subjects, within the now fulfilled oeuvre of Jiří George Erml, the New York bars from the 1990s represent a uniform whole that, almost paradoxically, brings together the two main sources of his work. It would of course be overly simplistic to reduce the characteristics of his work to this series – and yet, with the benefit of hindsight, his bars represent a kind of sum of his visual style, the culmination of his search, unfortunately including the tragic attributes and personal isolation that bars represented in his life. The interior of New York’s bars and the community of people that visit them presented Erml with stylish, original spaces, a preserved morphology of objects and their ubiquitous and never-ending circulation, so inimitably magical in the bars’ changing light and half-darkened spaces.
… Probably nowhere else does a newcomer experience such an intense sense of being a stranger or outsider, and nowhere else will he lose this sense of exclusion so quickly. This labyrinth of emotions naturally depends on the man behind the bar, the way he speaks, his body language. It is up to him whether the space we are entering is just another image, or whether it is transformed into a place that, for a time, becomes our miniature world – just as the line of the bar forms a kind of border, a border between our uncertainty and trust, between a closed world and the possibility of entering into it. The pause after which the bartender offers the possibility of crossing the boundary is one of his trademark privileges, and of course a part of his character….”
Kristián Suda (selection from the book Jiří George Erml: Collected Bars / New York 1990–1994)