We invite you to a guided tour of the exhibition The Patient’s Diary, led by Jiří Petrbok and curator Otto M. Urban.

Jiří Petrbok’s exhibition focuses on the theme of the self-portrait and presents the artist’s work from the 1990s to the present as a continuous record of a changing, constantly questioned “self.”

For him, the self-portrait does not serve to confirm or stabilize identity, but rather becomes a space for transformation, disguise, irony, and defense. In the paintings, the subject appears as a hybrid, a role, a symbol, or a body exposed to the pressures of the surrounding world. The exhibition’s title refers not only to illness but to the broader experience of a person who is subject to the influence of institutions, social expectations, symbols, and their own body. Here, the “patient” is the one upon whom the world weighs heavily, yet who simultaneously keeps a personal record so as not to become merely a case. Petrbok’s visual diary intertwines pain, the grotesque, humor, and anxiety, and across decades, it portrays identity as a process—fragile, ambiguous, and never definitively concluded.