Expat artists in Prague making art affordable for the city’s residents

Photo: Aidan Whitley, Fruit Juice Collective

Art can be expensive, but three expat artists who go by the pseudonyms Vinny Bonger, Big Kill, and Kilo Blimp, are partnering with local Prague businesses to make art more accessible for the city’s residents. The founders of the Fruit Juice Collective joined me in the studio to talk about their art philosophy, their current exhibitions, and the importance of art being accessible for everyone.

[Vinny] “We met about a year ago through Instagram funnily enough, and we came together because we all just wanted to create and make art, by ourselves. All three of us are artists and painters, and we were fed up with trying to go to galleries and have them take a fifty-percent commission. So we thought, hey – let’s do it all ourselves!”

Tell me about your art work and how you’re fighting inflation with your work.

[Kilo] “That is one specific concept we had for a show called Cheap Art Supermarket. We have a pre-existing pricing structure that we try to keep our art as low in cost as possible, because we really believe in art being accessible, we don’t like the idea of pricing people out of being able to purchase a painting. But for the Cheap Art Supermarket, we wanted to go even further with that idea, so we decided to price every painting at the cost of the physical item that we painted. So each painting was 67 crowns, or 120 crowns. And it was mostly trying to allow more people to buy more paintings and hear about us, but also about inflation and how everything is getting more expensive, so we wanted to turn something that is usually very expensive, like art, into something as cheap as possible, and really flip it on its head.”

See the rest here.

Author: Amelia Mola Schmidt