Headless Rider Bolf Mančuška Šerých Vaněk 24. 6. 2026 – 11. 10. 2026
Curatorial Team: Sandra Baborovská, Vít Havránek
The late 1990s – a time when a dial-up internet connection was a luxury, films were shared on VHS tapes, music circulated on homemade mixtapes and humanity waited to see whether the world would end at the turn of the millennium. It was during this period, as the Czech art scene was learning to function in a free society, that the group Bezhlavý jezdec (The Headless Horseman) was formed at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.
Josef Bolf, Ján Mančuška, Jan Šerých and Tomáš Vaněk entered an art scene that was much more intimate than today’s. The exhibition is not only a look back at the history of Czech art, but also a reflection on what we have gained over the past thirty years – and, conversely, what we have lost.
The Headless Horseman was founded in 1996 and joined the ranks of newly formed groups such as Pondělí, Koza Nostra, Jednotka, Luxsus and Podebal. Its members were united by a deep interest in neo-avant-garde art, classical literature, science fiction and DIY, which at the time stood in contrast to the one-dimensional language of advertising and mainstream pop culture. The name referred to their shared scepticism towards leadership and programmatic unity. In their day-to-day decision-making, a single “leader” was replaced by negotiation and artistic intuition.
The exhibition offers visitors the opportunity to step into an environment that evokes the atmosphere of the last great pre-internet generation. It is permeated by themes of fascination with television as a window onto the West, psychedelia, comic strips, experiments with altered states of consciousness and the everyday life of post-revolutionary Czech households. With a few exceptions, The Headless Horseman did not directly reflect in their work the contradictions that the 1990s still evoke today; rather, they explored them through the very forms of perception and transformations of the structure of everyday life.
The catalogue is published by GHMP in collaboration with AVU. Drawing on archival materials, photographs, interviews and other documentation, the book covers the group’s activities from 1996 to 2004 and offers one of the most comprehensive overviews of this chapter in Czech contemporary art.