In 2024 Jiří Valoch published with and the editions the text-installation - last word - as a limited edition.
It is a minimalistic, existentialistic intervention in space, which can be adapted by its owner to the surrounding architecture.
Valoch recalls in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist (In: The Czech Files, JRP Ringier, Zurich, 2015) how he started to work with text-installations: "I (...) had an urge to exhibit these words in an exhibition. I imagined a single word as a sign on a wall as the only contents of the entire exhibition (the first project was the word "horizon"). But the cultural atmosphere of the time had changed quite drastically and an exhibition of that sort was unthinkable. In 1971 I nevertheless showed a single word in an exhibition of Czech concrete artists in Brno. On a white panel lying in the exhibtion hall in the House of the Lords of Kunštát I wrote the word "ticho" (quiet), which, however, was modified so that the "i" was dotted on the top, and on the bottom, too. (...) It was the last opportunity to present such a work, all by itself, in an official exhibition space."
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Jiří Valoch (*1946, lives in Brno, Czechoslovakia) creates visual and conceptual poetry, minimalist happenings and interventions in the environment, as well as of artist books and text installations. Since 1966 he has worked as an art critic and curator.
From 1972 to 2001 he worked as a curator at the House of Art in Brno, preparing exhibitions of Czech artists as Václav Boštík, Milan Knížák, Vladimír Boudník, Jiří Kolář, Běla Kolářová and Adriena Šimotová; after 1990 also with international artists, like Robert Barry. Starting in the early 1970s he was involved in organising unofficial exhibitions across Czechoslovakia.
In the autumn of 2023, Jiří Valoch was awarded with Le Prix d’honneur Bernard Heidsieck-Centre Pompidou for his outstanding contribution to the use of text in an intermedia art practice outside the context of traditional literature.
Works by Jiří Valoch are part of international institutional collections like KONTAKT Collection, Tate Modern London, Archiv der Avantgarden/Dresden State Art Collection, MACBA Barcelona, ZKM Karlsruhe, National Gallery Prague, Museum of Contemporary Art Krakow, Moravian Gallery Brno, and international private collections like Gertraud and Dieter Bogners´, Sergio Tomasinelli's, Marinko Sudac Collection, Bonotto Foundation and the Mail-Art-Archive of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and Robert Rehfeldt.
In Autumn 2025 Anna Ebner-Quadri / and the editions organizes with EXILE, Jana Písaříková and Ondřej Chrobák (Moravian Gallery) a solo exhibition by Jiří Valoch at EXILE´s space in Erfurt. Find more information here.
