What is left when things disappear? And does it make sense to preserve everything that is created in a world overwhelmed by images, objects and information? The project and exhibition On Transience is a multi-layered account of change, extinction and the rediscovery of meaning in a time of turmoil and uncertainty.

This series of exhibitions, artist texts, public debates and a forthcoming balance book was created between 2018 and 2026. The impetus for the immersion in the work was the artist's personal experience of moving studios and having to decide what should stay on and what must disappear. Initially an intimate balance sheet of his own work, it gradually transformed into an urgent reflection on a contemporary world marked by pandemics, wars and the loss of natural certainties.

The exhibition accompanies the publication of the extensive book On Transience... (paintings, objects, texts), which maps the artist's work through the motifs of disappearance, transformation and return in new contexts. The two main thematic lines of the exhibition open up questions not only artistic, but also social and existential.

The first of these focuses on objects made of lead sheet - a material that is captivating, malleable, but at the same time dangerous to health. Some of the works were therefore consciously destroyed by the artist: after documentation, they were dismantled and remelted back into their original material form in the Příbram metalworks. The exhibition will present the preserved objects as well as a photographic record of their demise and transformation.

The second strand responds to the dramatic changes of the present: new wars, the experience of a viral pandemic and the gradual replacement of the natural world by artificial reality. Here, paintings, objects and photographs enter into an intense dialogue with the space of Synagogue na Palmovce, a place bearing the memory of time, extinction and revival, in which Václav Špale created a large part of his work.

The exhibition On Transience is not only about the end of things, it is above all a search for the meaning of change and a reflection on his own life's work.