High Craft
Designblok and Vogue CS magazine joined forces to bring you a unique selection of designers and producers who combine traditional craft and innovative, environmentally sustainable production processes with the highest aesthetic standards. See the crème de la crème of Czech design in the curatorial selection of Designblok director Jana Zielinski and Vogue CS editor-in-chief Danica Kovářová. This banquet of cutting-edge design will be held in the exceptional interiors of the Neo-Renaissance Queen Anne’s Summer Palace in the Royal Gardens of Prague Castle.
Between unity and diversity
Women and Muses in Architecture, Design and Art
The exhibition offers an encounter between twenty female designers, architects, and artists, a meeting of three generations of creators, peers, inspiring figures, tutors, students, and friends. This joint exhibition lets us see certain aspects of the female gender and builds on the festival’s main theme of “Courage,” as the exhibited artists must muster courage and will to meaningfully and successfully work in fields which mostly remain dominated by men.
Curator: Michaela Kádnerová, Moravian Gallery in Brno
Designblok for Kids
Design for everyone! First contact with quality aesthetics and local production can begin in early childhood. The children’s pavilion will offer playful elements produced by Maxim Velčovský, interactive installations, and brands which capture the imagination of the youngest design fans along with their parents and grandparents. There will also be a café and space for relaxation.
School Today
A hotbed of talent and revolutionary ideas. Presentations by leading, design-oriented central European high schools and universities offering a taste of the future through the eyes of generation Z. You can look forward to fresh ideas, inspiring and innovative concepts, as well as works pushing the limits of contemporary design developed by students and their teachers.
Mary McCartney: Portraits
A collection of works by British photographer, documentarist, and activist Mary McCartney is as iconic as it is intimate. This unique exhibition of portraits broaches important issues, riles emotions, and tells stories reflected in the faces of famous people we thought we knew. The unexpected selection of portraits is a retrospective view of Mary’s thirty-year-long career, and will present heretofore unpublished works, providing a look into her extensive archive. The work of Mary McCartney is an homage to the art or portraiture – she always manages to establish an intimate, personal, and gripping connection with her subjects, and the viewer is invited to take part in these intimate encounters and fragile moments.
Curator: Martina Lowe
Zdeněk Vacek
This year’s Designblok will be a milestone for leading Czech jeweler Zdeněk Vacek and this solo exhibition will celebrate his 25 years on the scene. But it will also be step into the unknown, as it presents the metamorphosis of his jewelry art into objects made for experimental site-specific installations. Zdeněk has always been very skillful at inscribing his unique visual language into his meticulously rendered jewelry, and now he is taking this experience to wholly new places.
Curator: Jan Dotřel
Jiří Pelcl
Once an angry young man and co-founder of the Atika group which defined Czech postmodernism, Jiří Pelcl has over the years become a leading force in product design –industrial, large-scale, small-scale, studio-level, you name it. And he is celebrating his 75th birthday with an exhibition presenting his views on what pertinently used to be called “applied art.” We are symbolically celebrating this anniversary with 7,5 principles: one commentary which impacted Pelcl’s work for each decade, inspiring the selected designs, including this year’s novelties.
Curator: Danica Kovářová
