The joint exhibition of Sofie Švejdová and Andreas Schmitten fills the gallery space with antiseptically elaborated “furniture”, “tailoring” or microarchitectonic hybrids that clash with the painted scenes of the flow of body fluids and their pictorial capture. The acknowledged unreliability of the painter’s grid and the deflected “pictures in pictures” contrast with the rational arrangement and balanced composition.

The exhibition was prepared in collaboration with KOENIG GALERIE.
The exhibition programme of Jiri Svestka Gallery is financially supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech republic.

Švejdová Schmitten Press Release

The summer exhibition is partly a commemorative reinterpretation of the oeuvre of Jårg Geismar, who suddenly passed away this spring. His works are complemented by paintings/objects by Jan Kotik from the 1970’s and 80’s. The works of both authors are presented in a new context and loosely linked to the textile objects made by a contemporary Czech artist Kristina Fingerland, who also works with illustration and sustainable fashion design.

The exhibition is financially supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

The solo show “In The Feelings Of My Shadow” of Leda Bourgogne is a complex installation comprising paintings, installative elements and sound, evoking an atmosphere ranging between the gym, theater stage and BDSM studio. In her meticulously built objects Leda Bourgogne works with allusions of historical painting and assemblage techniques, moving between handicraft and found objects. The frame and canvas serve for her as a means of pointing out power relations and the contingency of identity constructions. In her work she thematizes the objecthood of the image, the surface and sharp edges of which are covered fetishistically with layers of torn fabrics, latex or nylon.

Leda Bourgogne (born 1989 in Vienna, lives and works in Berlin) completed her Studies in Fine Arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in 2017. She is represented by BQ in Berlin where she debuted with her solo show “Skinless” in 2018. Her work is currently on view at Kai 10 Arthena Foundation´s “Body In Pieces”, Düsseldorf and in “Being Towards The World” at Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna. In march 2019 she hosted a one-night event at Pogo Bar KW, Berlin, comprising an elaborate sound-installation and live performance, of which elements will be applied in “In The Feelings Of My Shadow”. In 2018 she presented her work in a duo exhibition with Ida Ekblad at Kunstverein Braunschweig. She is nominated for this year’s Swiss Art Awards.

The exhibition is financially supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

Leda Bourgogne Press Release

Monika Pascoe Mikyšková (born 1983) works with monumental watercolour painting and plant-based or “mineral” objects. Her current installations resemble herbarium prints, moldings and casts combined with indoor plants. The questions of human corporeality and emotional experience interfere with the inhuman time of plants – caught and exposed, embedded in the botanical collection or artificially fossilized by decorative intervention. Sophisticated sculptural approach alternates with the intuitive accumulation of natural tissues.

Veronika Vlková (born 1985) combines emotionally aligned drawings and watercolors with intricately constructed installations in which she imaginatively layers video, textile objects, tiny ceramics and natural materials. She creates both narrative and freely associative structures, she also has long been dedicated to illustration and animation, especially in multimedial collaborative work with Jan Šrámek. Emotionally tense interior scenes and dreamy landscapes stretched between fateful melancholy and stoic serenity are now being shifted towards sensitive exploration of childlike imagination and scenographically constructed fantasy environment.

Monika Pascoe Mikyskova, Veronika Vlkova – Press Release

Under the title of Sima’s painting Cubes of Light presents Jiri Svestka Gallery exclusive collection of Czech Modernism artworks during the summer. Among selected authors are Emil Filla, Otto Gutfreund, Alfred Justitz, Antonin Prochazka, Josef Sima and Vaclav Spala.
Most of the exhibited works were created in the period of Czech Cubism, which is considered to be one of the peaks of the Czech art, when it reached the world art level. Equally interesting are five works by Josef Sima from 1950s and 60s.

Czech artist Tomáš Kajánek (*1989) often focuses on the ability of an individual to act in rigid social structures. With a specific sense of humor, his photographs question the social and linguistic rules, as we can see it for example in the exhibited series “Insurance Instructions”. The exhibition uncovers the connection between works by Tomáš Kajánek and outstanding Dutch painter Jan van der Pol (*1949). Having a strong affinity to the times we live in, Jan van der Pol is watching and observing the empiric multiplicity that surrounds us. As well he has a critical interest in technology, nature and science. In this context, his work is in compliance with the long and rich tradition of Dutch painting from the golden era of landscape painting to formal experiments of Piet Mondrian and De Stijl.

Kajánek – van der Pol – Press Release

In her work, Slovak artist Katarína Poliačiková (*1982) explores the medium of photography in various forms, creating context for overlapping different stories. The exhibition uncovers connections with the work of world-renowned American photographer Stephen Shore (*1947).

Poliacikova – Shore – Press Release

Gianni Caravaggio | Stanislav Kolíbal exhibition is a visual and conceptual dialogue between two generations of artists who are similar in many ways. In certain aspects, especially themes that the artists work with, they differ from each other. Besides the minimalist approach they share, both of the artists are influenced by the Arte Povera movement which emerged in Italy in late 1960 as a response to the previous decades. One of the most important representatives of this movement was Luciano Fabro (1936–2007). Stanislav Kolíbal had direct formal and philosophical connection with the Arte Povera movement in the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, when he exhibited together with Fabro and other significant Arte Povera artists, for example Jannis Kounellis. Gianni Caravaggio was absorbing the thoughts of Arte Povera as a student of Luciano Fabro in Accademia di Brera, Milan. An equally strong inspiration is by Gianni Caravaggio drawn upon ideas of German Romanticism, as Josef Beuys introduced them into the contemporary art, and concetto spaziale of significant Italian 20th-century artist Lucio Fontana.

Sculptor Gianni Caravaggio (born 1968) represents the young generation of Italian artists whose works transform artistic traditions, both new and old, into contemporary art language. Caravaggio is in his own specific manner building on the Baroque traditions. He combines simplicity of form and materials with Baroque pathos and plurality of meaning.

Works from 1960s and 1970s from Stanislav Kolíbal (bron 1925), one of the most important Czech post-war artist, imply rational simplicity in contrast to significant existentialist subtext that can also be perceived in the political context of totalitarian regime of that time in Czechoslovakia.

Ioana Nemes

The name of the current exhibition „Past-Present-Future“ is based on the work „Birdman (Positive & Negative Ring)“ by Romanian conceptual artist Ioana Nemes (1979-2011). The painting was originally part of the „Relicts of the Afterfuture (Brown)“ project. The works of Ioana Nemes refer to the pagan ceremonies that Romanian peasants kept for a long time alongside the Christian ones. The rural life was characterized by the faith in supernatural events and powers at that time. Ioana Nemes tried to capture this already vanished magical world. Though, the aim was not to conserve it, but to give it a new life and future. Ioana Nemes’s objects and installations are mostly made of natural authentic materials.

Georg Ettl

The work of German artist Georg Ettl (1940-2014) doesn’t easily fit in predefined art styles and movements. As a young man, he lived for more than ten years in the United States, where he got influenced by the dynamic American art environment of the late 60’s and early 70’s of the 20th century. He has collaborated with Donald Judd, Walter De Maria or Michael Heizer on the formation of the beginnings of minimalism and conceptualism. Ettl’s statues from the early 1970’s are characterized by the tension between physicality of object and intellectual abstraction. The artist used traditional techniques, the same as at the time innovative computer and laser technique. Perfectly crafted work reflects his rich philosophical knowledge and entirely individual thinking.

Katarina Poliacikova

Katarina Poliacikova, b. 1983, belongs to a very interesting and young post-Roman Ondak generation of Slovak artists. Her work is represented by two main directions. She reinvents, puts under question aura and originality of the art, deconstructing and newly interpreting it at same time. However simultaneously, she helps the viewer to feel empathy with a work of art by using her intimate personal memories. Both strategies intersect in the theme of remembrance as well as transience and possibility to manipulate memories. The work of Poliacikova includes a wide range of techniques: drawing, photography, video, sculpture.

Press release – Past – Present – Future