Exhibitions Confrontations in the Years 1984-1987

The subject of this bachelor thesis are the exhibitions Confrontations I-VI, exhibitions organized in 1984-1986 by students of the Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague. At that time, students were not able to participate in official exhibitions and the strong need to exhibit and confront each other led them to organize their own in their studios and apartments. Jiří David and Stanislav Diviš took on the task of organizing them after discovering that some of their classmates had the same needs as they did. The main aim of this thesis is to describe these exhibitions in as much detail as possible and to present their form on the basis of available photographs and reviews, and to evaluate their significance, both for the participants themselves and for the further development of visual art in our area. Furthermore, the thesis tries to place the exhibitions in the context of art and the social situation at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. Art production at that time was strongly influenced by the ruling communist regime, which bound art with a series of restrictive rules and did not allow everyone to exhibit. Thus, the organisation of exhibitions in alternative, non-arts spaces was not an isolated event. The final part of the thesis assesses the influence of Confrontations as the beginning of our postmodern art, especially according to the elements that the exhibition reviewers saw as postmodern in the art works