Jakub Janovský, Boy, 2024, concrete, height approx. 125 cm 

A typical object work by Jakub Janovský, this piece forms part of a broader series of figurative sculptures. These works evoke the time of childhood and adolescence, marked by radical physical and psychological transformation. The rigid figure of a boy in a growth phase refers, through its outer stillness, to the inner drama and pathos of transformation. These inner changes are symbolised by the covering of the face. The immature boy is enclosed in a kind of temporary spacesuit, isolated from the world of shared experience and turned entirely inward. He is a vulnerable figure, exposed to the essential trials he must inevitably undergo as part of his development. 

Jakub Janovský, Lying Figure, 2022, concrete, length approx. 120 cm 

The sculpture embodies a state of rapture. Yet, it is not an ecstasy rooted in external experience, but a somnambulistic descent into a dream, where lived reality interweaves with imagination and the symbolic systems we absorb through art (represented by the open book). The book conceals the face; it merges with it. It permeates human consciousness as a shared experience, reshaping and refining perception and sensitivity. The figure becomes both a receiver and a transmitter. What matters most is the nature of the signals the figure receives. 

Jakub Janovský, Pillow, 2024, concrete, 64 x 59 x 27 cm  

The concrete sculptural object is associated with rest and sleep. Its dominant feature is the temporary imprint of an absent human body. Sleep unveils a dimension of human knowledge that eludes rational reflection. The French Surrealists believed that consciousness (and with it, reason) represents only a small part of the unconscious. Therefore, the unconscious is essential and indispensable to human life. It serves as a laboratory where imagination, fantasy, and the capacity for envisioning alternatives for perception are born, reaching beyond the tight constraints of logic. From this perspective, even the physical presence of a person may be nothing more than an ephemeral dream, a temporary imprint, a trace that gradually fades over time. 

Vladimir Véla, Two Masses, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 300 x 110 cm 

The radically elongated format of Véla's painting resonates with the spirituality of the vertically drawn elevation of Santini's church, itself a response to the soaring Gothic core of its reconstruction. In contrast to this dematerialising abstract verticality, the motive of the two masses is introduced. At first glance, the painting resembles a suspended theatre curtain or drape, twisted at one point so that the change in the direction of the folds is mirrored in both the upper and lower parts of the red fabric. They may also represent two kindred yet differently sized amorphous masses, touching at a single point. Their colour and sculpting evoke slag fragments from the medieval mining heaps of Kutná Hora.