Polojasno – Tereza Kabůrková a Matěj Smetana

Matěj Smetana belongs among the most distinctive young Czech artists. He is a graduate of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno. His work is dominated by a few thematic areas that are not connected by one specific artistic style or approach; their character always determines the selection of the medium itself. Therefore he freely moves in a wide range of media and artistic strategies. He got into the public awareness with a series of objects e.g. Hradčanoid, Czechoid, Flags or the installation We are the World drawing inspiration from national signs and symbols. The topic of art, especially accident in art, was reflected in the project Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and John McCracken are like us where through macroscopic photographs Smetana ironizes the attempt of minimalists to gain a perfect art form and he simultaneously contemplates the idea of “accident`s authorship” in the process of the creation. Lighter, deprived of critical connotations, is the cycle of four computer animated films Instructions where by means of a simplified, schematic visual language the artist provides the viewer with instructions for how to create various things /e.g. a DIY trilobite, crystal etc./. Recently, he has been working more with animation creating half-narrative, half-abstract videos reflecting upon the themes such as physics, stars, planetary system, universe, unintentional and not deliberate influences on artworks and art as such.

When looking at works by Tereza Kaburkova one might think he/she is looking at the paintings from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her large-scaled photographs, mosaic-like installations consisting of strips of photographs reflect certain kind of l`art pour l`artism, a pure indulgence in the beauty of art and photography in particular, unveiling the emotional and expressive power of light, colour and space. At first sight her work might seem subtle and mundane. It might be her point of departure – rethinking art history and classic subject matter and media – that give this impression, but Kaburkova steps out of the limits of traditional medium of photography, experiments and endows it with new contemporary feel without loosing its nostalgic and sublime character.