Martin Nytra (b. 1987) has been continually tackling the themes of the individual´s imprisonment within a system, as well as in that context with patterns of upbringing and their status in the organizational structure of the state.
A final year student of the painting studio at the Prague Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, he is showing at the City Gallery Prague an elaborated version of his school exercise on the subject of “stained glass for installation in a place of worship,” developing it into a more generalized project relating in its idiom to the ethical and aesthetic codes of the Czechoslovak First Republic.
Hence also the title of his exhibition which is centered around the motive of the relationship of the individual as the embodiment of private and family memories, towards the institution of the state and the system-oriented organization of life in modern society. The dictum coined by the country´s first President, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, on “family as the basis of the state”, withered by the tooth of time and archaic, even ironic though it may now seem, has been seized by the young artist to turn it to a recurrent keynote of his output, dealing systematically with national and folklore motives. Proceeding from this repertoire, he singles out only certain fragments and significant markers to which he then assigns topical meanings, reinterprets them in his own individual manner, and re-encodes them into contemporary language.
The stained-glass exhibits here, which are by design arranged in a pattern similar to that of a church interior, relate to the folk decorative elements and ornamentation characteristic for rural male costumes from the region of Moravian Slovakia, the home of the artist´s grandparents. Nytra further develops this folk-art morphology, setting it against the backdrop of a real-life family story from the time of World War II, which took place in the Orthodox Church of SS. Constantine and Methodius, in Prague´s Resslova Street. This site, known to have offered the last shelter to the allied paratroop commando who carried out the assassination of Heydrich, was also the workplace of the artist´s great uncle, Bishop Gorazd, who was subsequently charged under Nazi laws with sheltering enemy agents, and executed. This powerful family story foreshadows Nytr´s depersonalized play with form and meaning, at the same time setting up a kind of dialectic counterweight to more intimately conceived canvases deriving from intuitive drawings and sketches of the artist´s immediate surroundings.
