JAKUB JANOVSKÝ

PILLOW AND LADDER

OPENING: 10. 9. 2024 OD 19H
EXHIBITION: 11. 9. – 2. 11. 2024

Chairs, glasses, boots or a scented tree for the car. Excessive construction, disturbing models and compositions that defy the laws of physics. A child alone on a swing, trapped in a maze of chairs, floating in a void. Three fundamental motifs naturally emerge through Jakub Janovský’s latest series of drawings. By emphasising familiar shapes or, on the contrary, by creating unexpected juxtapositions, a kind of exaltation of everyday objects is achieved. The recurring motif of construction and building blocks refers to children’s play, but pushes the context to disturbingly skewed limits. The absence of gravity introduces a pervasive tension. The solitary child characters lost in their inner world and surrounded by unspecified doom complete the scene.
With a bit of exaggeration, one could say that Jakub Janovský’s work literally grows out of the reality of socialist housing estate. His personal experience and collective memories of childhood in Czechoslovakia and then in the Czech Republic during the 1990s are continuously reflected in his large-scale paintings, subtle enamels and collages, solid concrete sculptures or simple drawings. Formally speaking, it is the drawings that serve as the foundation of his work, as they always stand at the beginning of each work as a sketch. In this exhibition, however, these drawings subversively take center stage, with their significance in some cases further emphasised through materialisation into minimalist sculptures.
Jakub Janovský (*1984) is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (Drawing Studio of Prof. Jitka Svobodová). He has been exhibiting regularly since 2007 in major galleries across the Czech Republic and abroad. His works are included in numerous prestigious collections, including that of the National Gallery in Prague. www.jakubjanovsky.com

curators: Tereza Bonaventurová, Martin Fojtek