The exhibition The Diary of a Patient focuses on the theme of self-portraiture and presents Jiří Petrbok's work from the 1990s to the present. 

The self-portrait does not serve to confirm identity or to stabilize it, but becomes a space of transformation, disguise, irony and defence. In the paintings, the subject appears as a hybrid, a role, a sign or a body subjected to the pressures of the surrounding world. The title of the exhibition does not refer only to illness, but to the broader experience of the human being exposed to institutions, social expectations, symbols and his or her own body. The "patient" here is one who is affected by the world, but who also keeps his own record so as not to become a mere case. Petrbok's visual diary combines pain, the grotesque, humour and anxiety, and across the decades shows identity as a process - fragile, ambiguous and never definitively closed.

The exhibition traces how this principle is reflected in different periods of the artist's work: from early images of bodily and existential transformation, through motifs of masks, protective suits and fragmented figures, to works in which family, institutions, public space and language increasingly enter the self-portrait. Yet Petrbok's work does not tell of a "true self" that could be revealed once and for all. Rather, it shows identity as a shifting set of roles, defence mechanisms, gestures and reactions, shaped by environmental pressures and internal experience. The Patient's Diary is thus not an intimate confession in the traditional sense, but an urgent portrait of a person trying to preserve his own coherence in the space between vulnerability and self-irony.

curator: Otto M. Urban