Ubu Gallery is exhibiting the Surrealist-influenced photomontages of František Vobecký (1902–1991) made between 1935 and 1938. While Vobecký originally took up photography as a means of documenting his paintings, shortly thereafter he started photographing found objects and details of rocks and sculptures. From there he moved to simple still lifes of ordinary household or everyday objects and subsequently, in 1935, began his exploration of photomontage. The influence of Surrealism (of which photomontage was a principal approach) in Czechoslovakia was pervasive during the 1930s, and it gradually replaced Functionalism and Constructivism as the principal ideology of the avant-garde. Surrealism dominated the “International Exhibition of Photography” organized by S.V.U. Mánes (Mánes Union of Fine Arts) in Prague in 1936. Certain series of photographic assemblages produced by Vobecký between 1935 and 1938 (on view at Ubu Gallery) were included in this important exhibition, the largest presentation of its kind in the 1930s. The 1936 exhibition led to the founding of the Photographic Section of S.V.U. Mánes, an official endorsement of photography by the most prominent artistic organization in Czechoslovakia.