Přemysl Procházka (*1991) is a Moravian visual artist living in Kuřim and working – if the location of his studio is anything to go by – in Brno.  After high school, which not only the people of Brno would call Sokolská, where he studied artistic blacksmithing, he enrolled at the Faculty of Fine Arts there. After one year with Václav Stratil, he transferred to the studio of Vasil Artamonov, where he graduated.

He finds painting interesting, trying to identify what he paints with the material – at an exhibition in Cheb, he painted the ground with real clay for children playing in puddles. This is not an attempt at a hilarious joke, but rather an almost "edgy" desire for truthfulness. In the same way, he worked in an interesting way to create a series of works devoted to football, gradually layering scenes from football matches onto one canvas, so that only the viewer who sees the video that mapped out this stage-by-stage creation has an almost complete knowledge of the work. There, he was primarily interested in time.

In comparison, the Náchod exhibition, which is devoted to handball, tries to stick to authentic materials, painting several works on advertising banners of the Kuřim handball team. Time has not left, either; during a visit to the studio I saw one of the paintings still unfinished – the players were missing socks and shoes. Procházka is a fan of the Kuřim women's team Kohoutky – he used to play handball himself. Unlike the aforementioned soccer, where he was primarily interested in timing, in current handball he is all about mass. He refers to the resulting images as hard, a reaction to the fact that he sees handball as a hard, contact sport. He has created what he refers to as his first real series; before that, the paintings were connected only by continuity. It's also the first time he's had real people in his paintings.

Procházka sees painting as a crisis of attention – the need for visual sensations is overwhelmed by displays. He thus sees hand painting as the opposition to artificial intelligence, and since the days when globality was pointed out, and it was the artists' goal, he (and certainly not alone) is betting on the local. I think this is the right bet, because in this direction one can feel authenticity.

curator: Petr Pokorný

The exhibition is part of the Artists under 40 series.