The festive opening of the exhibition JIŘÍ PETRBOK: IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE?!

Jiří Petrbok is a mystic and alchemist by nature. The psychological background of his works is framed by his interest in Jungian archetypes, which accompany him on his journeys through his own subconscious. Together with these unconscious and unplanned worlds, a number of "ordinary things" from the artist's surroundings get onto the canvas, without him himself having control over the very process of connecting, assembling or, conversely, disassembling them. At the beginning, there is a certain number of ingredients from which the artist cooks the resulting dish in a complex process of partly conscious and partly unconscious creation.

In Petrbok's work, endless imagination naturally intertwines with subject forms, while the artist himself often refers to himself as a sculptor rather than a painter. And it doesn't matter at all that he doesn't carve stone and haul bags of plaster. In short, Jiří Petrbok does not create pictures, but sculptures — beings. And they live in the given environment in their own strange, egotistical, often unruly way. It might seem that they do not consider their surroundings or the viewer, but they know about him very well, sometimes they even look directly at us, provoking us. They are strange animated mannequins with the rest of humanity, phantoms filled with terrifying qualities, threatening everything around and finding themselves in difficult situations unable to breathe, move, see. Their bodies are subjected to invisible torture — stretched on an invisible vise, dissolved by unknown chemicals, burned by an unquenchable fire. The environment in which they move is mostly real. The artist creates a space into which he brings sculptures and other "junk" and creates an object carrying countless references, symbols, metaphors. The viewer is cordially invited to visit to experience everything deeply disturbing and at the same time wonderfully crazy.

The presence of real useful things is important for Petrbok. Objects such as drills, vacuum cleaners, brooms, hair dryers, gloves, exercise machines, spacesuits or gas masks are reference points that help the artist not lose contact with reality, even if in the context of the painting these practical things somehow fail due to their original character. However, they are also part of the necessarily present humor and irony that will encourage us whenever we stop hoping. It is also typical for Petrbok to use motifs from the works of other artists, whether from history or the present. The inclusion of the sculptures of the Chapman brothers or Cindy Sherman's photographs is a bit of an endorsement and completes the fantastic and at the same time real picture full of archetypal contents.

The unusual and extreme formats of the works refer to Petrbok's interest in transitional periods of art history. Narrow and disproportionately high canvases, together with wild colors, violations of symmetry and deformation strongly resemble the principles of Mannerism. The musicality of the works is also evident. The individual elements in the picture can remind us of the tones that the artist as a composer adds or subtracts, and in a lively, energetic work he boldly mixes the harsh and screeching sounds of death metal with the delicately noble tones of classical music. In this way, some beings in Petrbok's paintings can remind us of the author himself, who moves around the studio with his phantoms as if deprived of his senses, only to exchange this occult dance in an instant for a peaceful, almost spiritual passage through the universe of the unconscious.

Kristýna Jirátová, exhibition curator

Jiří Petrbok (born 1962) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague from 1984 to 1990 with prof. Radomír Kolář and prof. Jiří Sopko. From 1995 he worked here as an assistant professor in the drawing studio of prof. Jitka Svobodová. From 2011 until this year, he led this studio. Jiří Petrbok's work is represented in numerous important collections, for example in the National Gallery in Prague, in the Prague City Gallery and other private collections in the Czech Republic and abroad. He has been presented in a large number of exhibitions in the Czech Republic and has also exhibited abroad alongside international stars such as the Chapman brothers or Maurizio Catellan. He lives and works in Prague.