by Adela Lovric // Oct. 3, 2025
With the opening of the group exhibition ‘HAC#2’ at Mánes Exhibition Hall, Havrlant Art Collection marked its decennial and kick-started the fourth edition of Prague Art Week. It’s only the second time that the private art trove of Czech investor and entrepreneur Kateřina Havrlant has been showcased publicly. Following ‘HAC#1’ in 2022, which focused on painting, the exhibition broadens the scope to a cross-media spread: sculptures, installations, videos and paintings by both Czech and international artists, many presented in Prague for the first time.
Since 2015, Havrlant has built a constellation of around 200 works by Czech and Central European artists, with a steady focus on emerging practices and long-term support. Curator Ján Gajdušek, who has steered the collection since its inception, assembled 45 works for the current show, turning it into both a retrospective glance at a decade of acquisitions and a generational snapshot: from the globally defining post-internet aesthetic to a more regionally-inflected “medieval core.”
‘HAC#2,’ exhibition view at Mánes Exhibition Hall, Prague, 2025 // Photo by Jan Kolský, courtesy of Havrlant Art Collection
The show is anchored by mixed-media works emblematic of the former—primarily Anna Uddenberg’s distinctly hyper-stylized, hyper-sexualized sculptural installation ‘CLIMBER (Pierced Rosebud)’ (2020). Olbram Pavlíček’s two adjacent wall pieces give an “Uddenbergian” riff, keyed to themes of power and deftly balanced between the cushy and the edgy, while Julie Béna’s ‘Lustre’ (2020), Julia Gryboś & Barbora Zentková’s ‘Paraván’ (2022) and Tadeáš Podracký’s ‘Lampa’ (2020) and ‘Křeslo’ (2022) continue Uddenberg’s furnituresque theme with sculptural explorations of the technical-versus-organic visual dichotomy. Fitted with artworks that take cues from interior design, the exhibition seems to playfully hint at domesticity, the decorative impulse of an average art buyer and the transformation of private into public—aptly reinforcing the fact that it draws from and celebrates a private collection rarely opened to view.
‘HAC#2,’ exhibition view at Mánes Exhibition Hall, Prague, 2025 // Photo by Jan Kolský, courtesy of Havrlant Art Collection
These pieces converse with the exhibition design by RUINA Office (Magdalena Uhlířová and Adéla Vavříková), which employs chrome-pipe frameworks commissioned from a company with zero art-world experience. These custom-made structures read somewhere between scaffolding and clothing racks, tying together a disparate set of works into a visually cohesive, industrial-chic showroom. The effect is total installation—a meticulously collaged moodboard at architectural scale.
Softening the cold, industrial-yet-sleek edge that acts as the show’s conceptual glue are, among others, textile-based works by Judita Levitnerová and Klára Hosnedlová, both of which also engage with more traditional subjects: nature and portraiture. Infused with a tinge of mysticism, Levitnerová’s large-scale textile painting ‘Pod sluncem Měsíce’ (2023) is created using pyrography, a technique that burns and melts fibers through soldering, while Hosnedlová conjures portraits that hum with a subtly disquieting, things-are-not-what-they-seem quality, realized through meticulous hand embroidery.
‘HAC#2,’ exhibition view at Mánes Exhibition Hall, Prague, 2025 // Photo by Jan Kolský, courtesy of Havrlant Art Collection
A separate room houses seven video works installed on custom steel pedestals, in sync with the rest of the exhibition’s design. Among them, Jakub Jansa’s ‘Shame to Pride’ (2021) and ‘Opening Ceremony’ (2022) offer a preview of the artist set to represent the Czech Republic at the 61st Venice Biennale. Populated by human-plant hybrids, Jansa’s absurdist fables deliver biting lessons on power relations through fantasy, amped up to the point of becoming grotesque.
Jakub Jansa: ‘Opening Ceremony,’ video still, 2022 // © Jakub Jansa
Framed as a time capsule of recent local and international art currents, ‘HAC#2’ also points forward—toward the next chapter of the young Czech art scene and toward Prague itself, where the city’s expanding Art Week is staking a claim as a contemporary art capital to watch. It also temporarily resets the spacious, light-filled Mánes Exhibition Hall—a 1930s landmark perched on the Vltava river, originally conceived as an art space but long rented out for anything but—to its original function, suggesting that reclaiming infrastructure can be just as critical as curating the art within it.
Exhibition Info
Mánes Exhibition Hall
‘HAC#2’
Group Show: Sept. 25-Oct. 6, 2025
havrlant.art
Masarykovo nábřeží 250/1, 110 00 Prague, Czechia, click here for map
