Prague, April 27 (CTK) – A large exhibition mapping the 60-year career of legendary Czech pop music singer Karel Gott, 77, called “Gott, My Life,” will be held on a boat anchored off the Vltava embankment in Prague from June 8 until the end of September, the organisers said in a press release yesterday.
The exhibition will be staged by the Richard Fuxa Endowment in cooperation with the National Museum (NM) in Prague.
Digital technologies and clip video screenings will be used in the exhibition.
“I have always wished to stage an exhibition in such a spirit. A display that will show my fans a comprehensive collection of artifacts mapping my whole career that also accompanied their lives,” Gott said in March.
“Karel Gott is undoubtedly a significant music personality and phenomenon of our times, and so he could not escape our collection-building as well as specialist attention,” NM director Michal Lukes said.
He said it is the museum’s mission to also document the present and to preserve evidence of it for the future generations.
The exhibition will map Gott’s career since the end of the 1950s, when he started as an amateur singer in Prague jazz cafes, to his first successes in former Czechoslovakia, to his reception by the contemporary young generation, the exhibition’s curator, Peter Balog, has said.
He heads the Centre documenting music and new media and he has devoted several years to the study of Gott’s professional career.
Fuxa’s Endowment held in the past the exhibitions of posters by Czech Art-Nouveau artist Alfons Mucha (1860-1939), from the collection of former Czech tennis player Ivan Lendl, and of artist Bohuslav Reynek (1892-1971).
The display of Mucha’s posters attracted more than 185,000 visitors in 2013, which was that year’s highest attendance at Prague exhibitions and one of the highest in Czech history. Fuxa bought the collection from Lendl, who left the communist Czechoslovakia for the United States in 1986, after the exhibition.
Gott, who is popular not only at home, but also abroad, mainly in Germany, is the winner of 41 Golden or Czech Nightingale awards for the best pop singer. Last year, he also received the Overall Czech Nightingale title.
Gott was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin lymphoma in November 2015 and he underwent a successful targeted oncological treatment.
He will return to the stage on May 31 when he will give a concert called “Karel Gott still aLive.” the tickets were sold out within a moment.
Former Czech president Vaclav Klaus decorated Gott with a state award for contribution to Czech culture in 2009.
Gott has two adult daughters by his former girl-friends. In January 2008 he married Ivana Machackova, 41, in Las Vegas. They have two daughters, born in 2006 and 2008.
