The exhibition Shards marks Bartoníček's return to sculptural practice following years devoted to digital and new-media technologies. Yet this is not a retreat but a reconsideration: as images are generated artificially and we are witnessing an inflation of technological production, physical material has turned into a means of resistance.

The artist has chosen cast iron as a medium, whose processing is lengthy, transforming the artistic gesture through the mould to the final casting. The surfaces of his objects show imprints of expressive shaping — a calligraphic gesture rendered in three-dimensional mass. The forms are dynamic and ephemeral: undulations, fragments, shards of captured movement. The material, on the contrary, is massive and definitive.