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A unique travelling exhibition organized by the Mucha Foundation on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Alfons Mucha called The Apotheosis of Love will be held until 30th September in the Municipal House.

The exhibition presents the whole production of the artist. Beside lithographs it displays pastels, drawings, graphic works, decorative objects or a less-known part of Mucha’s production – photographs, which until now have never been exhibited in the Czech Republic.

Each stop of the exhibition, which by 2012 will have travelled to Kutná Hora, Liberec, Ostrava and Pilsen, will have its unique conception and will always be the work of a different curator. Visitors will thus always be confronted with an original selection of  Alfons Mucha’s works and a new interpretation of his productions.

Overall, the exhibition, which is divided into the themes of family, life, beauty and humanity, will present more than one hundred works by Mucha. The exhibition in the Municipal House will be held until 30th September 2010, right after which it will move on to The GASK Gallery in Kutná Hora.

“Our objective is to present Mucha as a brilliant draftsman and a resourceful and creative personality and a great photographer, in short in a way that is not widely known to the public,“ says John Mucha,  Alfons Mucha’s grandson and the president of the Mucha Foundation. “It is a great honour for us that we can launch the series of exhibitions in the Municipal House, decorated by my grandfather,“ added Mucha.

It was Alfons Mucha’s belief that the main objective of art is the creation of beauty, which he defined as a harmony between the spirit and the body, between the inner and the outer world. He was convinced that good artists strong enough to inspire and unite people who believe in the same ideals, such as peace and natural development of mankind. The exhibition therefore focuses on the idea of love and unity, the central points of Mucha’s art and examines such themes as family, life, beauty and humanity. “The exhibition will definitely not be static and the same in all the venues, each gallery can decide, which of the themes they want to focus on,“ says the author of the conception of the travelling exhibition and the curator of the exhibition in Prague, Tomoko Sato from Japan.

The successive exhibitions in Kutná Hora, Ostrava, Liberec and Pilsen will always be prepared by leading Alfons Mucha specialists. For instance, the presentation in The GASK Gallery in Kutná Hora will be the Art-Nouveau expert of an international renown Petr Wittlich, whose exhibition will focus on Mucha’s conception of woman’s body and beauty, which Mucha could brilliantly picture for the illustrations of the highly spiritual book The Lord’s Prayer as well as for commercial posters. “It is well known that my grandad was a great patriot, which is why it was a matter of course that the anniversary of his birth should be celebrated in several towns of the Czech Republic,“ John Mucha explains the idea behind the travelling exhibition.

Alfons Mucha was born on 24th July 1860 in Ivančice. As a relatively little known artist of Czech origin living in Paris, he shot to fame in December 1894, when he took the commission to make a poster for the artist Sarah Bernhardt. He played a leading role in the shaping of the aesthetics of the French Art-Nouveau movement at the turning of the 19th and 20th century and also became famous as the creator of applied art. Besides posters, he also created bottle labels, chocolate and biscuit wrappers, calendars and decorative screens. He illustrated books and become one of the founders of the modern promotional art. The Mucha Foundation, which organizes the exhibition, was founded in 1992 and manages the largest collection of Alfons Mucha’s works.