Pragovka Gallery and The White Room cordially invite you to another synchronized openings. Within the program, two new exhibitions will be opened at the industrial space of former ​​Praga factory. At the same time, you will have a chance to visit another exhibition which already took place in the Pragovka Gallery / Rear. This exhibition called A hand will take it represents artists who passed or still study at Klaudia Kosziba´s painting studio at VŠVU Bratislava.

18:00 synchronized opening of exhibitions Petra Brázdilová: Chronicle of the Architectural Culture of a Small Village and Martin Matoušek: No limits

18:30 opening of the exhibition: Petra Brázdilová / Chronicle of the Architectural Culture of a Small Village / Pragovka Gallery

19:00 guided tour: A hand will take it / Exhibition of Students and Graduates of the Painting Studio at VŠVU Bratislava

20:00 opening of the exhibition: Martin Matoušek / No limits / White Room

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Petra Brázdilová: Chronicle of Architectural Culture of a Small Village / Pragovka Gallery

24. 4. - 20. 5.

The serie of paintings by Petra Brázdilová deals with the heritage of architecture during the normalisation in her native town Bystřička in Wallachia. The author as a local chronicler / interpretor is tasked with a rather ambitious and consciously unrealistic goal, mapping and capturing images of all the buildings located on the territory of the village, especially the local evergreens - Firemen, Sokol, Municipality, local boutiques, atc.

 As the author adds, "The past aesthetics of these unattractive buildings appeals with its ambiguity: by its uniqueness and ignorance of its surroundings, by its incoherent style and in the same time by its forced uniformity."

 Petra Brázdilová conceives the whole project as a painting task which exceeds the project-research background of the whole work using the suggestive and refined play with form, theme and her own playful self-reflection. In the end, it is more likely to come to multi-layered statement and artistic form that moves what originally locally specific has shifted into a form which at some way can border with clear fantasy or mutual symbols. 

A thoughtful amount of exaggeration, the oscillation between comity and tragedy, and playing with her own identity are all tools of artistic expressions which introduce other themes such as the relation of the center and the periphery, the corrected intent and the unpredictable casualty, personal and mutual, affectionate and sincere, successful and unsuccessful.

Curator: Martin Nytra

Martin Matoušek: No Limits / White Room

3. 4. - 20. 5. 2018

Martin Matoušek's smooth paintings draw the viewer into the images slowly but without any borders and limits. In a complete abstract range, they show the dematerialized nature in its basic form, when the viewer becomes witness to the processes of the origin and extinct of the geological forms of crystal transparency. Only few artists like Gerhard Richter or Mark Rothko can perceive and develop the link between the nature and painting so they do not interfere with the trap of mimesis, but they create a dialogue between them. Pure painting - seemingly without details – where in the joyful almost Turner´s féeries you can find a brutal dive into the unconsciousness of inner landscapes -  the mental worlds in which even the language mutes and stops working, showing the way to the depersonalized plane of feelings. Glamorous colorfulness stands out on the mahogany plates in that smoothness and everything flows in the pure aesthetics of the new romanticism. The monumental paintings of Martin Matoušek mediate the melancholy and the order in which both don´t struggle to each other , but excel and exist in the harmony.

This is one of the starting stages of his work from the previous year. Then Matoušek has come with a new form. In the image area, fragments of old wallpaper patterns begin to appear as the brutal layering we have seen in egalitarianism of today's values. In the composition he opens a fragment of the landscape with a fuzzy look - again as a fragment. Indeed, the older work of the author remarkably represents the industrial category of our world as an image of the civilization of extinction. The old retreats to the new one and reveals its monstrosity from the fog of the unconscious.

Curator: Patrik Šimon