Dominik Málek profiles himself on the contemporary scene as an emerging artist who brings to painting a specific contemporary generational sensibility, an inclination towards the psychology of relationships and how affects are stored in the body and memory. As a 4th year student of the Painting Studio II at the Academy of Fine Arts, with fresh experience of a study internship in Indonesia and internships at UMPRUM (sculpture with Dominik Lang, intermedia with Pěchouček and Gajarský), he works across media, but painting remains his key "laboratory" space.

Formally, he anchors his painting in figurative expression, which he sets in fancifully stylized scenes that straddle the line between intuition and thoughtful composition. He deliberately juxtaposes a naïve, illustrative and at times grotesque aesthetic with "adult" themes of intimacy and sexuality. At its core, he is interested in the tension between tenderness and aggression, belonging and isolation, attraction and manipulation. The theme of psychosomatics, previously developed also in ceramic-textile installations, has recently shifted to the mapping of relational dynamics. For Dominik Malek, the image becomes a distillation of personal experience, which he objectifies into general forms of emotional experience, into a super-personal plane offering shared essences of feelings and their atmospheres. In the background of his work, one can read a tendency towards a phenomenology of experience and a psychoanalytic reflection on childhood as the source of our patterns of desire and care.

curator: Pavel Kubesa