Exhibition: The Man of the Double (Jiří Černický, Filip Dvořák)

Date: 12.3. - 23.4.2025

We invite you to the unique exhibition The Man of the Double by the artists Jiří Černický and Filip Dvořák, which will open on Wednesday 12 March at 19:00 with an opening reception.

The Man of the Double
Jiří Černický and Filip Dvořák

Jiří Černický and Filip Dvořák are intermedia artists whose affinity goes far beyond the relationship of former student and teacher. They both enjoy the position of a narrator whose stories are full of mysterious hints, unexpected clashes and deliberate understatements, which they develop not only on the surface of the painting, but also in various object and installation creations. In their works, fiction constantly collides with fragments of reality, opening up space for the telling of imaginative stories with an unclear ending, in which the present naturally intertwines with the past.

The principle of layering, doubling and intertwining of meanings has become a determining factor for their joint exhibition, which the artists have conceived as an installation in which the individual works themselves become partial signs and symbols that are further manipulated in the installation. The narrative unfolds and mutates, fragments of the message overlapping new ones. In the installation we can move in all directions and explore various alternative paths of the story, as if we were climbing the branches of the tree from Dvořák's short story The Gulch. The artists relay the story like storytellers in the days before the invention of writing. What matters is not which artist is the author of which work, but the common search for new associations, small stories and references to references that can help us step out of the established paradigm. In the words of the artists, it is not so much a question of who is who, but "whether the double has an adequate human being".

Jiří Černický (*1966) is a creator of experimental, intermedia projects that often move between painting, object, video and photography. His work is often characterized by a socio-political engagement related to transgressing social taboos. He graduated in the studio of Miloš Šejn and Jiří David at the Academy of Fine Arts (1993-1997) and in the studio of Adela Matasová at the Academy of Fine Arts (1990-1993). From 2010 to 2023 he worked as the head of the Painting Studio at VŠUP. He is the winner of several prestigious awards, such as the Soros Prize (1996), the Jindřich Chalupecký Prize (1998), the 48th October Salon in Belgrade, Serbia (2007) and the main prize of the Graphics of the Year in the Vladimír Boudník Prize (2020). He was also a finalist for the Alice Francis Award for Interdisciplinary Art (2012). His work is represented in important Czech and international collections.He lives and works in Prague.

Filip Dvořák (*1990) often turns to history in his work, using the morphology of eras in which art had a fundamental spiritual role.He freely combines these motifs with contemporary materials, techniques and visuals. By using stories, reliefs, architectural fragments, ornaments, landscapes, assemblages or sunsets, he aims to search for truth and to portray the feeling that what he is talking about is the same today as it was hundreds of years ago. He graduated from the studio of Jiří Černický and Marek Meduna at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (2010-2015). In 2012 he completed a study internship at the Glasgow School of Art. Dvořák is a laureate of the ESSL Art Award CEE 2015, the Critics' Prize for Young Painting 2018. Since 2011 he has been exhibiting in the Czech Republic and abroad. His work is represented in major Czech and international collections. He lives and works in Hejnice.

Curator of the exhibition: Martina Mrázová

Admission free.