Milada Schmidtová: Putting My Dreams and Desires into Pictures, into Words…

Preview: written before the show opened

In 1946 Milada Schmidtová Čermáková took her War Cycle, Surrealist drawings made after the death of her friend Václav Chad, to Paris. The interest there went to the paintings of her mother, the naive painter Natálie Schmidtová. Milada withdrew to the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands and made her living as a beekeeper.

She went on painting portraits, landscapes and two series, Heads and Figures, that nobody saw. She left most of her work untitled and undated, and she was rumoured to have destroyed much of it. Her first small solo shows came between 2013 and 2017, and her first retrospective, in Jihlava, in 2018. You are looking at work that was virtually unknown in her lifetime.

GHMP quotes art historians Alena Pomajzlová, Ladislav Daněk and David Voda calling her work one of the most surprising contributions to Czech post-war art. It's at the Stone Bell House (GHMP Zvon) on Old Town Square, open Tuesday to Sunday until 8pm. Tickets are CZK 200 (CZK 90 reduced), and the building isn't barrier-free.