UNIQUE

Exhibition of graphic artists from Uni magazine: Michal Cihlář, Richard Fischer and Jiří Janda.

Michal Cihlář Michal Cihlář (* 16 September 1960 Prague) is a well-known Czech graphic designer, illustrator, photographer and artist. In addition to free graphics, which he does almost exclusively using the technique of multi-coloured or coloured linocut, he is also an illustrator, photographer, author's book, collage, wallpaper design, paper sculpture and stamp design, and is famous for his long-standing collaboration with the Prague Zoo.

"I used to do singles and LP covers, for example before the revolution for the Panton label. Apparently the editorial staff at UNI noticed this and commissioned me to do the first two illustrations. I was delighted. That was twenty-nine years ago. The cultural magazine was then in its fifth year, in black and white and cost eight crowns... The next offer came in 2017. And it was very unexpected, because it is already known that I don't listen to music much. But here it was a UNI cover for the 50th anniversary of the "banana" album of The Velvet Underground!!! Since then, our collaboration has been repeated once a year. So I'm happy every year." Michal Cihlář

Richard Fischer jr. born 1968, Tabor. Trained in mechanical engineering in Sezimovo Usti. After the war, he spent two years in a factory before defecting to the School of Art and Management in Hostivař, where he graduated in promotional graphics. Since then he has been a freelance artist. He creates illustrations and comics, and in his family project Domácí dílna he creates applied painting and interior design. He contributes illustrations to printed magazines and books. His first comic book, Rváčov, based on a script by Džian Baban, was published by Lipniky. Last year, he followed up with a second volume with Argo, for which he was awarded the Muriel Prize for Drawing. In his freelance work, he often falls under the spell of gloomy, forgotten or vanished places of old Prague, which is also reflected in his musical work in the duo Bavor and Javor. In this exhibition he presents comic adaptations of music videos of his favourites, published in the UNI Cultural Magazine.

Jiří Janda is a journalist and photographer. Completely untainted by any artistic education or at least training at the time of the coronavirus bans, in the spring of 2020 he arbitrarily picked up a chisel for the first time and began to carve into linen, and a little later he also printed the resulting linocuts. To his own surprise, he soon found an outlet for his prints on the pages of UNI magazine, where throughout 2021 he was given the opportunity to accompany his creations with Ondřej Váša's year-long series of articles entitled Hvězdné okénko - about the melancholy of stars caught in strings. In the same year, he was also invited to participate in the long-running outdoor exhibition Artists of Unijazz installed on the trellis in the garden in front of the Chestnut Club. This year he illustrated the cover of the May issue of UNI dedicated to the memory of the writer Franz Kafka.