Checking Prague’s Post-Revolution Artistic Pulse : Culture: If the art world has been slow tuning in to the Czech capital, it seems to be making up for lost time.

“Forget the Paris of the ‘90s. Prague is the New York of the ‘90s,” said a visiting art critic as he bumped into yet another American art-world personality on the streets of this intoxicating city.

Prague has been the place to be for excitement-seeking youth ever since the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Judging from the crowds of performers and people-watchers on Charles Bridge--the central, sculpture-lined pathway across the Vltava River--it still is.

If the art world has been a bit slower to tune in to Prague, it seems to be making up for lost time. Foreign critics and curators are falling over each other to see what’s going on now and to catch up with what they missed during Communist rule. Far more than the capitals of other Eastern European countries, the capital of Czechoslovakia has become an energetic art center, known for sending its art into the world and staging inventive exhibitions at home--despite a chronic lack of funds. “Prague is a place where things happen,” as an envious Austrian critic put it.

The evidence has been widespread this season. In Paris, the exhibition “Czech Cubism, 1910-1925” and stage sets by Czech designer Josef Svoboda were on view this spring at the Pompidou Center, while recent works by two generations of Czech artists and a retrospective of the late painter Josef Sima filled the Museum of Modern Art. In Vienna, the Museum of the 20th Century recently featured three artists from Prague in an enlightening exhibition, “Reductivism: Abstraction in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, 1950-1980.”

Meanwhile, in and around Prague itself, there is no shortage of opportunities to sample the Czech art scene. “Situation 92,” a recent exhibition at the spacious, river-side Manes Gallery, was billed as “the first big collective sample of the contemporary work of Czech artists to be organized in Prague since the Velvet Revolution.” Featuring works by artists who participated in the cultural resistance movement, the show resonated with political concerns, even if they weren’t immediately apparent.

Uninformed viewers were likely to see the show as an impressive demonstration of the sophistication and plurality of viewpoints that characterize current Czech art. But works ranging from figurative painting and abstract glass sculpture to mixed-media installations contributed to a politically charged aura.

Human images, in paintings by Michel Rittstein and Jiri Sopko, tended to be Gargantuan power figures or dreamy silhouettes in the process of escape, while sculptures often spoke of destructive force. The most prepossessing work in the show was a collaborative installation by four artists who call themselves Backwards.

Members of the group piled vestiges of their individual artwork, along with furniture, machinery and parts of old buildings in a mountain of debris that appeared to have been washed up in a tide of urban revolution. One component of the work was a hospital bed, said to have been used by artist Zdenek Beran, who was sent to a mental institution for “re-education” by the Communists.

A second exhibition, “Between Aesop and Maugli,” at the Vaclav Spala Gallery, featured works by young Prague artists selected to address the polarity between Aesop’s moralizing legends and Kipling’s romantic ideas of barbarism, as demonstrated by Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves in “The Jungle Book.”

Each floor of the gallery was devoted to a different theme: “The Discourse of Childhood,” “Wildness in the Heart” or “The Fox Hunt.” Throughout the show, nature appeared in various guises--pure instinct, fragile beauty, animal force and victim. The metaphorical concept of the show was intended to provide a forum for a wide range of art addressing social, psychological and ecological problems, according to curator Melina Slavicka.

There were deceptively light moments, as in Frantisek Skala’s send-up of hunting trophies, in a pair of stuffed deer heads whose faces were masked by leopard skins, and in Petr Nikl’s softly painted human images, combined with stuffed animals. But the overall tone was poignant and disturbing. Works such as Vaclav Stratil’s image of a wide-eyed man with an animal’s fluffy tail protruding from his mouth left little doubt that mankind’s own troubling nature was the real subject of the show.

While such exhibitions bring visitors to Prague’s galleries, Czech curators also organize shows for less conventional spaces. Ales Vesely’s monumental steel, stone, cement and wood sculptures--which allude to the bankruptcy of industrial force--fill parts of Prague Castle (through Aug. 25), for example.

Borrowing from the landscape of a stagnating society, as Thomas Messer notes in a catalogue essay, Vesely presents a threatening view of a society that has been locked up, rusted and boxed in by utopian dreams of a brave new world. The harsh reality of Vesely’s work doesn’t square with Americans’ fuzzy idea of a country liberated by poets and artists, but it does affirm that Czech artists have been alert.

One of the most ambitious art projects in Czechoslovakia is currently taking place at the Church of the Annunciation of Our Lady in Litomerice, an attractive town about an hour’s drive north of Prague. Here, in an early 18th-Century High Baroque church designed by architect Octavian Broggio, 17 artists (11 of them Czech) have been invited to create large sculptures, paintings and other installations specifically for the historic building. The show was expected to open this week and continue through the end of the year.

On a recent visit, several of the Czech artists had begun installing their works, and the effect was stunning. No polite exhibition of artworks quietly tucked into corners of a house of worship, this show bombards visitors with aggressive images of anguished humanity. The church, which has been used as a warehouse for many years and has only recently undergone restoration on the exterior, is bare of furniture but the pale interior is a ghostly reminder of what was once an ornately decorated structure.

One artist, Peter Oriesek, has created a series of six life-size plaster male nudes rushing down a flight of stairs. The figure at the bottom has four sets of arms that reach out in desperation. Jiri Sozansky’s immense sculpture in the center of the church appears to be a torture machine, which conveys life-size figures on a sort of railroad track to a tower where they are trussed, elevated and crushed. In another horrific work, Oldrich Kulhanek has fashioned giant balls--portraying a gaping mouth, a doubled fist and staring eyes--which he intended to suspend from the ceiling.

Meanwhile, Pavel Nesleha has created a flame-like sculpture, and Karel Pauzer was at work on an enormous tongue and jaw, with other components of his sculpture in process.

The idea, according to curator Olga Sozanska, is to “confront current art with a Baroque setting of exceptional quality and to initiate a creative dialogue between Czech and foreign artists.” By using the building, she and organizations backing the project hope to inspire interest in restoring the church’s interior, she said. The current exhibition is the first in a five-year program designed to “contribute to a renewal of culture in the region of Litomerice and to attract sponsors to complete the church’s repair,” Sozanska said.

The out-of-the-way location may make it difficult to reach this goal, but anyone who sees the striking exhibition is unlikely to forget it. You get the impression that the Velvet Revolution was effective partly because the artists behind it were as tough as their work.