Prague, June 6 (CTK) – More than 50 graphic artworks by U.S. musician and songwriter Bob Dylan, winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, are displayed at an exhibition in the Old Town Hall in Prague that opened today, its organiser and gallery owner Zdenek Kocik has told CTK.
“We have managed to gain a collection of 55 artifacts. They were created on the basis of the sketches Dylan was drawing during his trips,” Kocik, who runs the nearby Gallery of Art Prague (GOAP), told CTK.
His gallery organised the exhibition entitled On the Road or The Unknowns Face of the Known Artist in cooperation with the Halcyon Gallery in London. It will run through the end of August.
The event will present Dylan’s works from 2008-2014, a collection of his gramophone records and photographs by Alan Pajer showing Czech president Vaclav Havel and Dylan during his concert in Prague in early November 2005.
The displayed artifacts are numbered and signed. They were made by the “giclee” technology of ink digital printing.
Dylan, 76, ranks among the people who have influenced the world pop music the most. A major part of his songs with unconventional lyrics come from the stormy 1960s.
Before the Nobel Prize, Dylan became the first musician in history to receive the Pulitzer Prize. Besides, he won 11 Grammy music awards as well as Oscar and Golden Globe film awards.
Dylan published poetry and fiction as well as his memoirs in 2004.
He also devotes his time to drawing and painting, often depicting the American landscape. He presented the so far largest exhibition of his pictures in London last year.
The awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Dylan has been the most radical decision by the Swedish Academy since 1901. He became the first musician to receive this award.
This was expected to stir up a debate on whether lyrics are of the same artistic value as poetry or novels. However, the media focused rather on Dylan hesitating to accept the Nobel Prize.
He accepted it eventually and though he did not attend the award-giving ceremony in Stockholm last December, he prepared a speech that a Swedish Academy member read instead of him.
Dylan played in the Czech Republic, in Prague, for the first time in 1994 when 14,000 people came to the concert, including president Vaclav Havel. He also met Dylan personally. Dylan returned to the Czech capital a year later and he also gave concerts there in 2003, 2005, 2010 and 2014 and in Ostrava, north Moravia, in 2008.
