Disruptive imagination

“No one has been able to confirm whether Foucault actually said the words: ‘I’ am no prophet. I’m just making windows where there were once walls.’, it has been enough for people to think he did.” (Jane Neal)

Robert Runták has based his international collection on posthuman painting, a uniquely Eastern European phenomenon of post-millennial European visual art, which references the foundations of various realisms (especially surrealism), postmodern motion picture and photography culture, as well as literature. While, in the early 2000s, the Czech collector was still focused on contemporary artworks from his homeland, as of 2011, the collection took on an increasingly international character.

It is this concept that the Hungarian exhibition of the collection – presented to the inter-national public for the first time – follows as well. The international section is organized along two main threads: the works centre on the situation of the individual person and the greatness of the artistic spirit.

Works are displayed by such significant artists as, for instance, the Chapman Brothers, Daniel Richter, Jonathan Wateridge, Tilo Baumgärtel, Tim Eitel, Wilhelm Sasnal and Martin Eder. In addition, such artists of defining influence from the region are also represented as, for example, Attila Szűcs, Zsolt Bodoni, Serban Savu and Szabolcs Veres.

With reference to the kind of destructive worldscape these artists present to us within the spaces of the ArtMill, Jane Neal writes: such “[d]isruptive imagination or ‘myth making’ creates culture and we need it to inspire and to effect change”.