15 Jan 2009

Czech art work lampoons EU members

10:48 am on 15 January 2009

The Czech government is deciding what to do about an art installation it commissioned that has offended countries across the European Union.

The BBC reports the government in Prague thought it had commissioned work from 27 European artists.

But it turned out to have been entirely completed by Czech artist David Cerny and two associates.

Entropa portrays Bulgaria as a toilet, Romania as a Dracula theme-park and France as a country on strike.

The Netherlands is shown as series of minarets submerged by a flood - a possible reference to simmering religious tensions there. Germany is shown as a network of motorways resembling a swastika.

The work was installed at the weekend to mark the start of the six-month Czech presidency of the EU.

Cerny says Entropa "lampoons the socially activist art that balances on the verge between would-be controversial attacks on national character and undisturbing decoration of an official space".

He first created a splash in the early 1990s when he painted a Soviet tank, a Second World War memorial in a Prague square, bright pink.