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A Shocking Experience Behind the Curtain - Artist and Curator Tour

  • Czech Centre, Vitrínka Gallery 30 Kensington Palace Gardens London, England United Kingdom (map)

Jakub Matuška aka Masker: A Shocking Experience Behind the Curtain / Artist and Curator Tour

The Czech Centre London presents A Shocking Experience Behind the Curtain, an exhibition of new paintings by Jakub Matuška aka Masker, the award-winning representative of new figurative painting in Central and Eastern Europe, renowned for detailed combinations of digital manipulations, airbrushes and masterly use of traditional drawing and painting techniques. The artist returns to the UK with a first major exhibition in more than a decade.

For Jakub Matuška, 2023 was a pivotal year. Technically and thematically, he reached a level of self-assurance he had been building toward for years, crafting his own stylistic universe as one of the most prominent figures on the Czech art scene. He celebrated his newfound confidence with an extensive monograph, A Man of Special Shapes, summarizing fifteen years of artistic development and maturation. This was accompanied by two outsized exhibitions: the critically acclaimed installation When the Wings of Swallows Obliterate a Granite Block from the Face of the Earth at the Castle Riding School in Hluboká nad Vltavou, and the popular exhibit The Sphere, Or You’ll Pass Ten Stones on the Way to the Abyss at Villa Pellé in Prague. Simultaneously he has prepared a larger presentation at the international stage, where he has been making his mark since his prolonged stays in London and New York, and through representation by galleries in Paris and Leipzig. In the spring of 2024, he launched a major installation in Tokyo’s Shibuya district, and now continues in London, taking over the both Kensington galleries of the Czech Centre.

Matuška's work has been recognised for its meticulous combination of hand-drawn sketches, digital interventions and acrylics applied on canvases with both sprays and brushes. His richly-detailed, vividly coloured figurative paintings, which explore existential yet poetic themes from contemporary urban life, balance the weariness and melancholy of its subjects with pastel lightness and implicit humour. The post-analog response to the intersection of the "old" and virtual worlds gives rise to a sophisticated interplay of digitally manipulated motifs expertly executed in traditional painting techniques, wholly revealed only in close, personal interaction with his large-scale canvases.

A Shocking Experience Behind the Curtain presents the selection of the last two series of Matuška’s paintings, most of which are being exhibited for the first time.

Here, the painter’s life themes, the difficulty of increasingly mediated communication, the tension between observable and inner worlds, or the struggle to bridge the gap between the conceptual and the material on the canvas, resurface with renewed urgency. Constantly examining his own experiences and the life in his immediate surroundings, while remaining acutely attuned to the movements within Western societies, he returns to the ups and downs of family life and its intersection with creative work.

The figures in these new paintings—now seemingly successful, middle-aged men—often retreat from the realities of their middle-class anchoring into the woods, the thickets of city parks, or the silence of a nocturnal studio. Tragicomic and vulnerable, instead of achieving the authority that masculine stereotypes assign to the peak of one’s productive years, they find themselves bumping against the limits of understanding with their partners and humanity in general.

But despite the melancholy and struggles with both personal and societal bipolar tendencies, the subject of the exhibition is not sorrow, but rather contemplative observation of inner processes, exploring the paradox of imagined versus seen reality on a single plane.

The transitions between worlds are formally conveyed through unexpected combinations of perspectives, cut-outs offering insights, or shifts in technique. Even smaller formats play with the magnified reproduction of quick, loose ballpoint pen sketches, switching between parts developed freehand, lighter shading or layering different strengths of linear strokes, gradually moving towards more dominant motifs built with quick, loose brushstrokes directly onto the canvas. In a first, the latest works now add watercolour effects into the large-format paintings, with finer strokes and pastel colours. As Matuška’s inner world once again gains the upper hand, the ongoing ethereal transparencies in his work allow us to see even closer.

Curated by Michal Nanoru

About the artist

One of the leading Czech artists of his generation, the Prague-born Jakub Matuška aka Masker (b. 1981) started out with graffiti and street art and today focuses primarily on painting and drawing, occasionally crossing over into sculpture, video, installations and public interventions. Since 2013 he has been blending his boyish, ironic and poetic reflections on contemporary urban life with increased mindfulness of his inner processes following a holistic experience. The persistent questions ‘how should a person be?’ and ‘is understanding possible?’ serve as the foundation for his ever-inquiring exploration into the fraught relationship between image and language, as well as between painting and drawing, and into the different capabilities these media possess in making sense of our surroundings.

More than a decade of combining traditional painting techniques, computer manipulation of handdrawn sketches and the use of an airbrush on large canvases have allowed Matuška to explore questions of flatness and depth, solid and liquid, digital and analogue, transient and eternal, symbolic and everyday, and charming and confusing, creating his own rhetoric and dismantling conceptual and formal certainties in the process. ‘Like Eulenspiegel, a joker and trickster educated by the street and equipped with an owl, a mirror, and the pea jingling in the spray can, Matuška mostly turns situations, sentences, and states against them,’ wrote Mladá fronta Dnes.

Matuška received an MFA from The Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 2009. In 2010 he was a finalist for the most prestigious Czech prize for young artists, the Jindřich Chalupecký Award. One year later he won the National Gallery in Prague’s 333 Award. Following his residencies at Middlesex University in London and the Cooper Union in New York City, his work has been exhibited internationally. He lives in Prague.

  • EXHIBITION OPENING and London launch of the retrospective monograph Jakub Matuška aka Masker: A Man of Special Shapes
    Tuesday 8 October 2024, 18:30 – 21:00 (Register here)

  • EXHIBITION DATES: 8 October 2024 – 24 January 2025

  • VENUE
    Vitrínka Gallery, Czech Centre London
    30 Kensington Palace Gardens, London, W8 4QY
    &
    Bouda Gallery, Czech Centre London
    132 Palace Gardens Terrace, Kensington, London, W8 4RT

  • OPENING HOURS:
    Tue – Fri 10am – 5pm
    or by appointment - +44 (0) 207 836 3669

To find out more and book your space, click here.

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