The name René Rohan is inextricably linked to the art group Kamera Skura. The group was formed by the coming together of several artists with similar views who met in the legendary pub U černého pavouka while studying with Petr Lysáček and Daniel Balabán at the Department of Fine Arts in Ostrava. Its members committed to never exhibiting or creating work outside of the group. For this reason, almost all of Rohan’s independent art work takes place within his school years, when it was submitted as part of assignments or dissertations.
During this early phase, the artist mostly created works dealing with his own family history, such as the photographic installation Bratr Bratra / Brother of Brother, his diploma work from 1997. Using portrait photography and concise, almost technical titles, Rohan subjects his family members to scrutiny and asks what emotional ties and bonds this group of people have with each other beyond the innately biological and social. The family is presented as a scheme of theoretically the closest people linked by trauma, unresolved events and dysfunctional relationships. In another photo-montage series from his art school days, Rohan deliberately manipulated and mystified to the point of sarcasm and irony historical images from a family photo album in order to materialise the mysteries that beset him as a child, namely the obscure family ties and events that he was unable to understand as a youngster. This authentic part of his work, focused on his immediate surroundings and the intimate micro-world of the family unit, gradually gives way to an interest in the social issues of his hometown and thence to the principles underlying art itself. What is and what is no longer art? What is the relationship between art and kitsch? These are the themes that have inscribed themselves in the work of Kamera Skura. In Rohan’s work they take the form of ironic puns, as in the series Romantické krajiny a umělé ráje / Romantic Landscapes and Artificial Paradises, in which he draws on works by Milan Kunec and texts by Milena Slavická.
In addition to his art work, at the turn of the 1990s and 2000s he played an active role in the organisation of Ostrava’s cultural life. The post-revolutionary cultural scene in Ostrava formed a kind of wild alternative to the distant and inaccessible centre represented by Prague. The aim of the main representatives, be they members of Kamera Skura, Jiří Surůvek, Petr Lysáček or Michal Kalhous, was not to define themselves in relation to or in conflict with the Prague art scene, but to make themselves known, to penetrate it in some way or establish a mutually beneficial interpersonal and cultural dialogue with it. To this end, private galleries began to emerge in Ostrava during the latter half of the 1990s, whose founders were just starting to explore the domain of gallery production.
One of the new exhibition spaces, Gallery 761, founded in 1996 by the well known Ostrava figure, sculptor and painter Stanislav Cigoš, stands out. Alongside the Fiducia Gallery, the Sokolská 26 Exhibition Hall and Jáma 10, it soon became an important meeting place and exhibition space. In addition to production, Cigoš, along with Lysáček, also curated most of the exhibitions with the aim of presenting the most progressive contemporary art in Ostrava. The gallery’s programme was based on exhibitions of tribal artists, including Rohan, Kalhous, Jaroslav Koléšek, Aleš Hudeček and David Jedlička, as well as exhibitions of foreign artists and big names from the Prague art scene, often from the MXM gallery circuit. Among the first to exhibit here was Jiří David, who actually opened Gallery 761 with his exhibition, followed by presentations of works by the Tvrdohlaví group, Vladimír Skrepl and Jiří George Dokoupil. Artists belonging to the older generation included Adriena Šimotová, Jiří John and Karel Malich. In 1998, the gallery played host to a group exhibition examining the relationship between the centre and the periphery entitled Ostrava-umjeni…? curated by Jana and Jiří Ševčík and reprised the same year at the Mánes Gallery in Prague.
Due to the parlous financial state of Gallery 761, in 1999 its curator and friend of Cigoš, René Rohan, became involved in its operations and saved it from closure. Along with a change of management, the gallery relocated from the outskirts of Ostrava closer to the centre, where it was housed in the basement of the Fiducia cultural centre. Milan Knížák took over the opening exhibition in the new premises and under Rohan’s curatorial direction. In the same year, Rohan held his exhibition Made for you, in which he drew on a postmodern play with advertising symbolism. Instead of product, Rohan presented himself in the form of self-portraits or erotically styled photographs of his personal effects. By advertising “himself”, he was responding to what was the new world of consumerism in Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s. Rohan led Gallery 761 until his departure from Ostrava in 2002, when he handed over the function to Petr Pavlán. During his tenure, the theme of art from the periphery was developed in addition to the tradition of solo exhibitions already begun. In 1999, Rohan organised the exhibition Ostrava-Ústí, thus linking up two distinctive but separate cultural centres, each with its own art faculty. In 2000, thanks to Gallery 761 and the Sokolská 26 Exhibition Hall, audiences in Ostrava were able to become acquainted with young Slovak artists such as Dušan Záhoranský and Boris Ondreička.
Just as he had taken over management of Gallery 761, so now René Rohan took over the organisation of the last two Malamut festivals, 1998 and 1999. This festival of action forms of art was founded by Stanislav Cigoš and Petr Lysáček in 1994, when the first year – in terms of the number of exhibitors the largest – took place all around Ostrava. In the first few years the programme focused on the Ostrava art scene, along with Slovak and other central European artists. Subsequent years, curated by Rohan, continued this tradition, but on a more modest scale and with a greater emphasis on the participation of the youngest generation of artists, which at that time included Tomáš Vaněk and Petr Nikl. In addition to action art, the event showcased artists working with public art or site-specific projects.
At present, René Rohan is involved in the business of transporting, storing and selling artworks. However, his business acumen in this sphere was already apparent when he was running Gallery 761. In order to raise funds for the venue, Rohan offered to rent paintings or sculptures to clients for special events, or even to create limited edition serigraphs of individual artists. At present he is the owner of high quality depositories for the storage of artefacts that can be rented by anyone, from private galleries to individual artists, looking for suitable storage space. Rohan has thus created a large space allowing for trading in art. Anyone is welcome to visit, view the works on offer, and buy them there and then.
