PAVLA DUNDÁLKOVÁ:
BLURRING / TEXT BY
PAVLÍNA MORGANOVÁ
21/09/23–20/11/23
Blurring sometimes means focusing
Where do people find the inspiration to create? Where do they find the desire and determination to make time in their busy lives to draw, sculpt, or write something? I don’t know. What I do know is that one test of whether this desire is genuine, forcing its way to the surface from within, is motherhood. The daily routine of raising a small child – nursing, changing diapers, all things care-related – keeps one busy day and night. When at such a time the desire to create turns to frustration because there is no time left, we can speak of passion, of artistic drive despite all obstacles.
Pavla Dundálková graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague seven years ago. She attracted attention through her sculptural interest in space, in experiencing it first-hand, and in its exploration through drawings, objects, and installations, which she often brought to life through innovative performativity.
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ARGIŠT ALAVERDYAN, JOZEF MRVA:
SPAMBOT FICTION /
TEXT BY PETER SIT /
25/01/23–15/03/23
This entanglement is found in Mrva’s work in the form of knots, where he was inspired by Knot Theory, which is a field of topology that focuses on mathematical knots that cannot be untied without being broken. For Mrva, the knot is a metaphor for repetition, a theoretical concept for describing the cyclical setting of the flows of the modern day capitalist society and culture.
Like the philosopher Benjamin H. Bratton, they understand that cloud platforms, the Internet of Things, mobile applications, energy networks, privatization of public services, and many other phenomena should not be understood in isolation, but as a new, unpredictable planetary megastructure – the Stack. It becomes another dimension of the space we inhabit with multiple impacts on our lives. Bratton deals mainly with the geopolitical dimension, for example how these structures shape new architectures of governments, platforms becoming a kind of para-state having power over the current ones.
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JIŘÍ PITRMUC:
AN UMBRELLA
INSIDE OUT / TEXT
BY SIGGI HOFER /
09/09/22–09/11/22
Protest, the poster and manifesto
Siggi Hofer about Jiří Pitrmuc
Nothing is moving in the vast landscape. Though, in reality this diverse life has already surrounded us. We ran into it, and it got stuck on us like cobwebs. Life watches us, walks in front of us, follows us, and reminds us. It acts, creates, expresses itself. In the form of a young artist, it fidgets with logs while a paintbrush is firmly stuck between the teeth. It swings from house to house, and in the room, it jumps from wall to wall and goes for a walk on the ceiling as if there were nothing to it, and when it suddenly crashes with the back at full tilt onto the floor, this happens deliberately and with a big grin. Despite the derision, which laughingly comes up with some strange things. Life is not to be killed. As quick as a lightning it reshapes again, transforms windows into doors, and straps a locomotive onto its feet.
RICHARD NIKL:
FACTSPAWN /
TEXT BY MIRIAM
BETTIN /
13/04/22–13/06/22
stalo – nestalo se
it happened – it didn’t happen
In the post-factual era in which inconvenient truths are countered with alternative facts, science suddenly finds itself in a crisis of justification. In the echo chambers and lie factories of the digital space, facts become fiction and vice versa.
In Richard Nikl’s “soft diagrams”, digitally rendered paintings from printed layers and painterly touch ups of which four are on display in his presentation at stone projects, the artist gives a certain softness to seemingly hard facts. In the form of graphs and mind maps, it is an attempt to grasp the outlines of flapping ideas without shapes.
ALEXANDRA BARTH: MECHANICAL BATH /
TEXT BY MATÚŠ
NOVOSAD /
09/02/22–29/03/22
In Alexandra’s paintings of bathrooms, displayed at Stone Projects in Prague, we can observe the heterogeneity of their styles, the contradiction, hence the erasure of provocative vitalistic fantasies. This heterogeneity doesn’t apply to artistic voice but subject: „A painter’s creed is an everyday guarantee of tradition, to dive in, into still life of the world free of fateful controversies” (OČ). The lack of distinguishability in bathroom styles, tied to the value of features, is not rare in Alexandra’s works, but it is most noteworthy in these displayed paintings.
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JIŘÍ BARTŮNĚK: UMSCHLAG / CURATED BY JIŘÍ ČERNICKÝ /
14/07/21–15/08/21
Jiří Bartůněk lives in Ústí nad Labem, a city where culture had always been on the periphery of the city, which is itself a periphery in the context of the cultural centres of Bohemia. This is why this artist was amongst the first generation of artists who began to engage in art, deep within the communist era, whose creativity took its vitality from the best that could be deduced from the world to the west of us.
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MODEL LINE: DAVID VOJTUŠ / TEXT MAREK MEDUNA, HEDVIKA OCÁSKOVÁ /
27/05/21–11/07/21
Série
Samsung QLED
Modelová řada
DAVID VOJTUŠ
Obrazovkkka
Technologie: Swag, Flex
Podsvícení: Direct LED
Obnovovací frekvence panelu 24 Hour
Další vlastnosti obrazu HDR
Podporované HDR standardy HDR10+, IOS
I heard that David Vojtuš uses recycled material. With the addition that he does not do so to demonstrate his ecological integrity, but because recycled material can be a prism through which to see some neglected parts of our present. Many say that David Vojtuš rejects clearly identifiable topics, does not narrate, does not display, does not illustrate. It is said that he strives to build material analogies, because lifestyle and culture are connected with matter, with its slow and fast transformation, with burning and pupal emergence. I received an email in which one user complained that the time had become a constant and frustrating update.
PŘEMYSL PROCHÁZKA: TRANSPORT / TEXT ONDŘEJ CHROBÁK /
07/10/20–09/12/20
The theme of Přemysl Procházka could be summarized as „painting about painting“. Nevertheless, or maybe precisely because of this, the vast majority of his paintings go beyond the conventional notion of a classic hanging painting. In some cases, this is because of the unusual materials used, both for the foundation and the „colours“.
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ARGIŠT ALAVERDYAN, SEBASTIAN BURGER, FILIP DVOŘÁK, RICHARD NIKL, ADAM VAČKÁŘ: LINE OF BEST FIT / CURATED BY DOMENICO DE CHIRICO /
14/07/20–26/08/20
Line of Best Fit seems to indissolubly dance on a knife’s edge, a very thin thread that invisibly marks and draws boundaries, divides the space by creating subspaces whose perimeter seems to displace with an infinite rhythm. And this is not because the infinity has made its way, creeping between the works on display but due to the fact that the perimeter of each formal hint exalts is an extravagant final boundary line, as the word itself suggests, to which it stays glued and in doing so moves more and more creating a dance of boundless lines.
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ARGIŠT ALAVERDYAN, SEBASTIAN BURGER, FILIP DVOŘÁK, RICHARD NIKL, ADAM VAČKÁŘ: LINE OF BEST FIT / CURATED BY DOMENICO DE CHIRICO
14/07/20–26/08/20
ARGIŠT ALAVERDYAN: ROLE-PLAYING 2 / TEXT MAREK POKORNÝ /
06/06/20–07/07/20
Dear Argišt,
Twenty years ago, Petr Písařík created a graphic sheet to come to terms with the fascination of the design of the then new MacBook. The front view of the elegant device, simply converted into abstract surfaces, was dominated by an orange frame of the manufacturer’s preset screen, while the body of the computer with the keyboard flattened into a low rectangle, underlining the basic surface color accent. Without this given inspiration, we would have deciphered the subject rather uneasily. At the time, it was mainly about the external, a modernist emblem of social status, and another possible way to cope with seedy abstraction – emptied, formal, but always alluring. But you, dear Argišt, are already entering the „internal.“ However, your painting theme is not so much the aesthetics of computer games, but rather the imaging based on their rules or on the fascination with the permeation of virtual space by an analog mind.
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JIŘÍ KOVANDA,
ROBIN SEIDL,
IVANA ZOCHOVÁ:
ROCK, PAPER,
SCISSORS
06/02/20–18/03/20
Jiří Kovanda is one of the most prominent figures in contemporary czech art. His works are represented at prestigious art exhibitions internationally. In addition to maintaining an active, international career as an artist, he is also a respected educator as he continues to influence and encourage generations of emerging artists. We are very pleased to present Jiří Kovanda at stone projects together with his students Robin Seidl and Ivana Zochová.
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ANNA K.E.: GLOSS
OF A FOREHEAD /
CURATED BY NOEMI
SMOLIK /
07/11/19–20/11/19
Anna K.E.’s background as a ballerina informs her artistic practice, which concerns the relationship between objects and their environment, and how the latter can often define or limit the former. Through installation, sculpture, and video, she often focuses her explorations of space on gallery architecture or the artist’s studio. In her videos, K.E. engages in absurd or abject activities, such as attempting to fold a mattress across her body or to row herself across her studio on a board—gestures which question the utility of artistic creativity. The utopian promise of Modernism, especially as espoused by architects, lurks in the background of K.E.’s practice, which adopts these antecedent forms while questioning the ideological virtue and relevance of them by positioning them against her Sisyphean actions.
FOAF PRAGUE / WITH WSCHÓD WARSAW / STRANGER DANGER: ONDŘEJ BASJUK, KAROLINA BIELAWSKA, FILIP DVOŘÁK, MIKOLAJ MOSKAL / CURATED BY LAURA AMANN /
30/08/19–18/10/19
‘I hate travelling and explorers’ are the famous first lines of Claude Lévi-Strauss ‘Tristes Tropiques’, published in 1955 and mostly describing his expeditions to Brazil a good 15 years earlier. In an era that saw bookshelves filled with tales of journeys to exotic places and dangerous tribes, the anthropologist, a revered and heavily romanticized figure himself, feels ‘held back by shame and disgust’ as he stands before the task of putting his ‘adventures’ into writing. Anyways ‘anthropology is a profession in which adventure plays no part’.
FOAF PRAGUE / WITH WSCHÓD WARSAW / STRANGER DANGER: ONDŘEJ BASJUK, KAROLINA BIELAWSKA, FILIP DVOŘÁK, MIKOLAJ MOSKAL / CURATED BY LAURA AMANN /
30/08/19–18/10/19
ROMANA DRDOVÁ,
JU YOUNG KIM:
SPACE BETWEEN
MY FINGERS / HAIKA
WRITTEN BY MINAMI
NISHINAGA /
03/05/19–09/06/19
0 kcal doesn’t mean transparent calorie.
It can be anything less than 5 kcal / 100ml or 100g.
0 exists as if she does know something.
–
Shes work on experiments to adjust opacity of things around hers from 100 to 0 and 0 to 100.
Always shes can find the very exact opacity for each object.
–
She found one glass box in inbox.
There was jelly without fruits.
Agar agar (0) Kanten (30) Gelatin (70)
ROMANA DRDOVÁ, JU YOUNG KIM: SPACE BETWEEN MY FINGERS / HAIKA WRITTEN BY MINAMI NISHINAGA /
03/05/19–09/06/19
ADAM VAČKÁŘ: BIOTECHNOLOGY GARAGEBAND PHASE / CURATED BY MARIANA SERRANOVÁ /
09/11/18–20/12/18
‘Chemistry, just like economics, (these days almost indistinguishable) will lead the anthropology of the material culture of this era.‘ ‘Today we encounter other materials that are potentially equally transformative. From biotechnology to the Internet of Things to Artificial Intelligence and Robotics to Network Production and the Replication of Additives, this variety of materials allows for the re-composition of the world on previously unthinkable scales, the transformation of living tissue into a plastic medium and the intertwining of inorganic machines and landscapes with new kinds of practical intelligence.‘ Benjamin H. Bratton
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ONDŘEJ FILÍPEK /
WORKS
18/10/18–04/11/18
Ondřej Filípek attempts to find a new order and adjust the relations between technological and ‘organic‘ things, which are homogenized in his works made with plaster. The morphology of his object derives from industrial products, frequently construction materials, plastic pipes, and screws. He creates figures whose physicality is connected to people. These semi-technological figures are in a standing position and have a body stretches out vertically like Giacometti´s sculptures. He focused most of all on points of connection, where the dramatic moments of the sculpture occur, exposes its construction.
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