August 11th - September 10th, 2023
However different the artistic means and expression of Barbora Mikudová and Martin Kubica are, their exhibition "Dismantled Temples" is in the spirit of a joint search for the pathos of the fall and destruction as a widely felt drama of our time. Through the painting and sculpting processes, each one of them comes within sight of the baroque tension. However, the look and movement upwards (towards the heavens) replaces the inverse trajectory in their works. In Barbora Mikudová's figurative paintings, the fall of the figures seems to cause not only grotesque deformations of their body constitutions, when the human figure is interchangeable with a pile of undressed clothes, but at the same time it also declutters the surrounding backdrops of the world, which are shown to be artificial, constructed and unstable. Her interior still lifes are also characterized by a "theatrical" atmosphere, whose effective illusory naturalism seems to underline the deceptive nature of oneself. Kubica's sculptural situations, inspired in no small part by the practice of the restorer of sacred spaces, transfer a similar issue to work with broken draperies, isolated fragments of symbols and especially to the approach to the exhibition space itself as a "temple of art". Thanks to his interventions, the preservation or loss of this status is shown to be conditional on not/fulfilling a set of external signs. But at the core of this exhibition lies one insoluble contradiction. If it is not possible today to fully surrender to the beauty and majesty of the divinely ordered world (and its mirror in art), this does not mean that it is not perversely fond of watching the destruction and chaos break through its cracked surface.
Fall and tumble in the paintings of Barbora Mikudová (*1992) and in the sculptural situations of Martin Kubica (*1987) is an external sign of a common search for the pathos of fall and tumble as a widely felt drama of our time. The exhibition "Dismantled Temples" is to date the largest Prague presentation of two outstanding personalities of the young generation from Ostrava.
Barbora Mikudová & Martin Kubica - Dismantled Temples curator: Jiří Ptáček
graphics for the exhibition: Eva Hanzalová
The exhibition will run from August 11 till September 9, 2023. Opening: August 10, 2023 from 6 to 10 pm
Music at the opening: Nill Garcon