Kateřina Komm, Karla and Marie, 2017, concrete, 150 x 100 x 250 cm 

The sculpture serves as a poetic murder ballad and evidence of the suffering that befalls human fates. The author draws inspiration from her family history: "This piece shows my great-grandmother Hedvika Kvapilová. She has never eaten fish, and neither have her descendants. While exploring our family's oral history, I discovered the reason behind it. My great-grandmother had sisters named Marie and Karla. Their fates mirrored one another. My great-aunt said they had no luck with men; they married violent and unfaithful men, and in the end, they both drowned themselves in the river. Searching for salvation in the river, Marie took her two-year-old daughter Mánička with her."

Ivan Pinkava, Moonshine, 2018, photograph 

The simple arrangement of a chair and a round table is reimagined through an alternative compositional logic that reflects a shift in perspective. Their practical function gradually dissolves, replaced by associations connected to the memorialisation of subjective experience. The notion of experience as a fleeting, shapeless essence is conveyed through the staged reconfiguration of banalities and their theatrical illumination. Deeply familiar things suddenly vanish, becoming a magical mirror of memory which evokes a poetic vision of cold moonlight.  

Ivan Pinkava, Pietà, 2019, photograph 

The staged photograph alludes to a medieval Madonna sculpture, more precisely to its fragmented torso. The arrangement of the drapery recalls the refined sculptural modelling typical of the Gothic style. The golden vegetal ornamentation of the fabric highlights the exceptional status of the Madonna (the Pietà) in Christian iconographic tradition and the reverence bestowed upon her. The figure of Christ is missing. It is a deconstruction of an incomplete image: a fragment of tangible history (a sculpture as artefact), a vanishing memory, but also a reminder of our cultural identity that instinctively fills in the gaps and incomplete frameworks of physical evidence and facts.