In 1994, four young painters, Marie Nováková, Kateřina Rutherford (Pinďáková), Jana Rozková (Černohausová) and Doris Windlin, met at Professor Radoslav Kutra’s at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno.
The first three come from Morava, the eastern part of the Czech Republic. The fourth comes from the Canton of Obwalden, Switzerland, where she studied at Professor Radoslav Kutra at Kunstseminar in Luzern. Since 1996 she has been living in Poděvousy in West Bohemia, the Czech Republic. After a stay in Italy, where they painted together, and graduating from university, they felt a need to establish a painters’ group which would deal with the theory of new vision based on the teachings and Professor Radoslav Kutra’s SCHOOL OF SEEING, both in theory and practice. In 2006, on the occasion of an exhibition in The Town Museum and Gallery in Hustopeče u Brna, Marie Smetanová from Prague, who had been cooperating with the group and whose painting is based on the same theory, was accepted as a new member of the group EXPERIMENT 2.
The name EXPERIMENT 2 was chosen in connection with the group EXPERIMENT, which was established in 1959 by four painters born in the late 1920s – František Dvořák, Radoslav Kutra, Jaroslav Uiberlay and Miroslav Jemelka. These belonged to the generation of painters who did not have the possibility to study until after the Second World War and who significantly influenced the form of fine arts in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s. They aimed to overcome the uniformity of socialistic realism, and also to clear the way for the return and appreciation of both Czechoslovak and European interwar art.
The feeling of “backwater” and the vulgarity of descriptive socialistic realism prompted many artists to establish a group in which their opinions and artistic progress could be formed through mutual confrontation. At the turn of the 1950s and the 1960s, a number of so called “creative groups” were established, but the Czechoslovak Association of Visual Artists, which made this possible, still supervised them strictly. However, many young artists were allowed to exhibit their works which the public could not see before.
The movement of “creative groups”, along with Experiment, which was rather small, but on the other hand a more uniform formation, contributed to easing the strict pro-regime conditions in the Czechoslovak Association of Visual Artists, which culminated in 1964.
The painters from Experiment based their work on colour perception, the way it was discovered by Impressionists, and tried to get hold of modern European trends in a new way. At the same time, it was very important for them to bring spirituality into the art, which they perceived as a revival of Christian painting.
The group did not last for a long time. However, in 1973, having immigrated to Switzerland, Radoslav Kutra founded a painting school called Kunstseminar in Luzern and further developed and deepened the Experiment’s ideas, which he named School of Seeing.