Edition m

One of the first actual products of Kunsthalle Praha, a developing art institution with a gallery in the heart of old Prague, and the flagship of its planned educational activities, is Edition m, focusing on the life and work of Central European artists underrepresented in the Czech publishing world. The inaugural title of the series created in collaboration with the Academia publishing house and the KODL auction gallery provides the most extensive classification and interpretation to date of the work of Antonín Chittussi (1847–1891), one of the first Czech painters to draw attention to urban peripheries and industrial landscapes. This will be followed by monographs of Teodor Rotrekl, Grigorij Musatov, Karel Souček, Jan Smetana, Vincenc Beneš, Vojtěch Hynais and others. The look of the series is defined by the edition’s logo, fonts from the Suisse Works and Suisse Intl families, and finally the photographs on the cover, complemented by colors derived from the profiled artist's work. Andrea Vacovská's idea of the photograph literally visualizes the contemporary going around the work, seeing it from various angles, and the concept of the edition as an actualization and "creative interpretation of the artist's legacy". It demonstrates the temporal conditionality of the view of the presented work – reading the life and work of the authors in the context of today and their contemporary presentation, radically different from the situation in which the authors conceived it. "It is therefore a matter of presenting the work through thought constructions, so that it is clear that the selected artist has closed his subject work in the form of artifacts, but at the level of mental processes his work is able to continue to exist and eventually create more progressive biographical schemes," states the introduction by the series editor Štefan Tóth.