Dear Petr Nedoma,
My name is Chiera Arqui and I am an art collector.
I am writing this open letter to congratulate you on the recent exhibition at the Rudolfinum, A Cool Breeze. It was a pleasure to be part of the great opening yesterday. I was very happy to find that the exhibition fits so well to my interests, since from the 17 exhibited artists only 3 of them are women and most are western male artists.
I understand how important it is to support male artists especially nowadays when feminism is putting so much pressure on the freedom of art and so much emphasis on gender, when actually choosing artists should be based on purely aesthetic decisions. Therefore, I completely agree with your position and with the fact that you choose to make solo exhibitions only for male artists with very little exceptions, for example the last solo show of a female artist, Taryn Simon, in 2016. It is understandable that not many women could fill such a difficult space with their artworks, like men do it with their strong, vivid and monumental paintings and sculptures. When we discuss about Czech female artists it is even more problematic because they cannot reach the expectations given by such a big and important institution, like some foreign artists sometimes do.
The exhibition A Cool Breeze is definitely multilayered, as it was mentioned in the curatorial text, presenting so many diverse representations of the human body from one single and the only important perspective, the male one. Who else can show better and through impeccable aesthetics the ideals of beauty than straight cis gender men?
I understand how important it is to support male artists especially nowadays when feminism is putting so much pressure on the freedom of art and so much emphasis on gender, when actually choosing artists should be based on purely aesthetic decisions.
Since I realized how similar our focuses are, I would love to present you my art collection. I just started collecting in 2014, but already acquired many interesting western white male straight cis artists. I am open to many different mediums and subjects the artists work on. The earliest work I have is from the late 60s, and the newest one is from 2018 so the range of styles and movements is wide. The only thing that I am quite constant with is to make very careful estimations of value and calculate how the artwork will grow in the future. This is why I mostly collect white straight male artists; they still are nowadays the most profitable in the global art market. Some of the artists I collect and I would recommend are: Andrew Laurisson and Simon Fifty (two Fluxus members), minimalist sculptor John Holder, or emerging artists like Harrison Moser, Robert Korn, Julius Althuber. Currently, you can see their amazing works on my instagram but this year the catalogue will be also published: https://www.instagram.com/chiera_arqui_artcollection/
If you find my collection interesting, I would be more than happy to start a collaboration. I would generously lend pieces from my collection to Rudolfinum for future exhibitions in order to enrich our community and to put the artworks again into circulation.
With best regards,
Chiera Arqui
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