Peter Weidenbaum is an established artist born in 1968, Antwerp, Belgium, lives and works in Liège, Belgium and Hradec Králové, Czech Republic.
Weidenbaum’s work cannot be defined as having few stylistic elements or constants.
It is rather an exploration into our culture of images and the materialization of thoughts within the context of art.
“We look with our brain. This is the starting point of my exploration of images; whether it shows itself in sculpture, in an installation or painted on canvas. My work is a reaction to the dictatorship of reality and a quest for the metaphysical.”
As early as 2004, Peter Weidenbaum worked on a series of paintings that originated in the Czech forests. With the title of the exhibition ‘Holzwege’ the Belgian artist Weidenbaum refers to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger – with all the contradictions in his life for which he is now perceived as a supporter of the Nazi regime more than a philosopher.
In his publication ‘Holzwege’, Heidegger refers to the origin of the work of art and a kind of truth around or in the work of art. Of course, a philosopher or a phenomenologist has a different attitude to this than the artist. For the artist, this path is an imaginary walk through what can arise in his studio.
New paths and choices in a world in which we are overwhelmed by images. Today, the new media provide such a number of images that we can no longer correctly estimate what is personally relevant to us. For Weidenbaum, the image itself does not come first. But it is the action of the painting and the idea around it that leads to the final work of art.
Jan Kotik
Jan Kotík belongs to a small group of Czech artists whose work has a unique position in the world context. His artistic expression is very personal and with a visible impatience with dogmas of all kinds. During the Second World War Kotík was a member of Group 42, a group of painters, photographers, poets and theorists whose programme was to put the world we live in back into works of art. After the war he took up Chinese calligraphy, which greatly influenced his work.
Selected works by Jan Kotík from the 1970s and 1980s show an inventive work with fragments, cut-outs and scraps, a striking “assemblage” and modular variation that draws attention to the object-oriented nature of Kotík’s works. The use of uniform layers of paint, in turn, almost looks like the painting of some kind of fantastic furniture. The painter’s wild expression and fondness for gesture may also recall micro-trends in contemporary art of the past decade. The improvised way in which simple materials clash with wild colours in Jan Kotík’s later works is reminiscent of DIY ingenuity. Their meaning lies as much in their objecthood as in their conceptual background.
Pavel Büchler
Pavel Büchler, born 1952 in Prague, is an artist, teacher and writer of Czech origin, living in the UK since 1981.
Between 1992-2016 he worked at the Glasgow School of Art and Manchester Metropolitan University.
In recent years he has exhibited at Fondazione Prada, Milan, Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Kunstmuseum Bern, National Gallery Prague, IKON Gallery, Birmingham,
CIFO Art Space, Miami, Middleheim Museum, Antwerp Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Art, Broad Art Museum, Michigan, Power Plant, Toronto,
Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver.
The Moravian Gallery in Brno is preparing his retrospective for 2023.
Matyas Chochola
Katarina Poliačiková
Katarína Poliačiková primarily works with photography, moving images and installation. In all these media, she combines a post-conceptual approach instructed by the history and theory of 20th century art with specific poetics, guided by intuition and carefully chosen lyrical elements. With her work she transcends the conservative conception of photography as a record of reality, she tries to connect the human conception of time with geological or cosmic temporality. Recently, she has been focusing more intensively on literary writing, as evidenced by her book “Skipping school, learning the fire of things”, published by Jiri Svestka Gallery in 2019.
Monika Pascoe Mikyšková
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.
Jan van der Pol
Jan van der Pol (*1949), a Dutch painter based in Amsterdam, focuses his work on contemporary themes, observing and exploring the empirical diversity that surrounds us. At the same time, he critically reflects on technology, nature and science. In this sense, his work works in line with the long and rich tradition of Dutch painting, from the “golden era” of landscape painting to the formal experiments of Piet Mondrian and the De Stijl movement.
Gianni Caravaggio
Sculptor Gianni Caravaggio (1968), who grew up in Germany and currently lives and works in Milan, 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,“ says Jiří Švestka.
Tony Cragg
The British sculptor is one of the most acclaimed artists of his generation. Tony Cragg’s sculptures can largely be organised into groups according to the different materials from which they are made: stone, clay, bronze, glass, different synthetic materials like polystyrene, carbon- or glass-fibre. His sensitivity to different materials is and has been the starting point for his work. To a great extent, his choice of material has determined the form, which a sculpture has taken on.
Cragg represented the Great Britain at the 43rd Venice Biennale in 1988, the year he won the Turner Prize.
Jårg Geismar
The work of Jårg Geismar (1958 – 2019) is characterised by frequent alternation between ambiguity of thought and literalness in physical outcomes. In Geismar’s work, the meanings of familiar concepts of art criticism and theory, such as drawing in space and relational aesthetics, have always teetered between over-saturation and complete looseness: a state in which all interrelationships threaten to snap like ropes stretched beyond measure, and points of contact become loose. The endless networking across architectural space, social groups and artistic media gave the name to the subtitle of his monographic book The Red Line.