The final works of students and graduates of Faculty of Arts BUT

Last year, the Brno City Gallery launched a long-term project in which it annually presents the final works of students of the Brno University of Technology. The first year presented the works of students from the Studio of Spatial Creation, namely Aneta Chalabalová, Katarína Marošiová, Lukáš Vacek and Jana Krajná, this year the curatorial selection went across studios, and finally concentrated the view on the final works of students from two different sculpture studios - namely from Sculpture Studio and Spatial Creation Studio.

Although the former studio favours mainly classical sculptural disciplines such as portrait, figure, relief, small sculpture, monumental sculpture, with an emphasis on materials ranging from traditional to new media, the selected student Valerie Moravcová clearly shows with her work the possibilities of transcending from traditional sculpture towards free spatial forms. In her artistic thinking, she finds correlations between real space and shape or dimensional illusion, as well as explores the themes of optical transformation of the work due to changes in lighting conditions and viewer's movement. Through spatial installation of reliefs, Moravcová creates fragments of interiors and imaginary rooms in which real space intertwines with mental image and memory. Drawing on her experience with traditional craft and printmaking practices, the artist here transforms the principle of the matrix from a means of image creation to the final artefact itself, shifting her thinking from 2D to 3D and linking the image and its medium into a single entity.

In this respect, Valerie Moravcova's work approaches the focus of the Studio of Spatial Creation, where students develop the possibilities of the sculptural object, various types of installations, site-specific interventions and audiovisual and multimedia projects, to work with overlaps into other, not necessarily artistic and cultural disciplines. These approaches are very well represented in the exhibition by the work of Kateřina Výletová and Mikuláš Mitana.

Kateřina Výletová in her spatial installation transfers the traditional hand embroidery technique from textiles to building materials. She draws on her personal experience of the Moravian folklore environment, where costume, ornament and handwork are a natural part of festive and everyday situations. She works with the idea of "dressing" architecture - just as she dresses herself in costume, she also dresses architecture symbolically. For her, quilted objects open up the relationship between the face and the reverse, that is, the tension between the visible and the hidden layer. She sees embroidery not only as decoration, but as a physical intervention in the matter that is usually part of the hidden construction of architecture. In her work, what usually remains invisible becomes a fully-fledged part of the resulting spatial form.

Mikuláš Mitana's Mikuláš Mitana's diploma work, in its title PROXY, sums up the whole logic of the project: a representative, a mediator, someone/something acting for another. Here Mitana uses AI tools, specifically ChatGPT, as a constraint system that forces him to step out of habit and abandon established workflows. The work thematizes the conscious delegation of the executive part of making to technical apparatuses, instructional systems and institutional procedures. This is not just a technical procedure, but a conceptual starting point - within which Mitana asks where authorship ends and the mediator begins. The resulting objects of bent steel rods rocked by mini-rotors present a situation where sculpture ceases to be a closed form and becomes a temporal event between drawing in space, vibration and subtle sound resonance.

The work of graduate Mikuláš Mitana is part of the exhibition Star System / Diplomas of FaVU 2026, which will open on 24 June 2026 at 16:00 at the House of the Lords of Kunštát (Dominikánská 9, Brno).