Exhibition: Anatomy of the Wilderness

Date: 9.10. - 7.11.2025

JIŘÍ DAVID, PAVEL JESTŘÁB feat JOLANA SÝKOROVÁ

We cordially invite you to the opening of a new exhibition at the Beseder Gallery on October 9 at 7 p.m.

The new exhibition at Beseder Gallery, part of the 1+1 exhibition cycle, brings together artists Jiří David and Pavel Jestřáb, with contributions from Jolana Sýkorová.

Jiří David was a long-time teacher at AVU and UMPRUM. He is still an active artist, citizen, and activist, a man who cannot remain silent. In the late 1980s, he was one of the organizers of the unofficial Konfrontace exhibitions and a founder of the Tvrdohlaví art group. He began as a painter, a representative of postmodernism, but in the 1990s he began to use installations, objects, photography, and interventions in public space (Heart at Prague Castle (2002), Key Sculpture (2010). His work is difficult to classify because it covers a wide range and is constantly evolving, sometimes even contradicting itself. This is the basis of David's creative principle – not to stagnate and to keep moving forward.

Pavel Jestřáb is a graduate of Jiří David's Intermedia Confrontation studio at UMPRUM. His study stay in Taiwan (2014) was crucial for him. This Asian island allowed him to look at the Czech cultural background from a distance. Thanks to his inclination towards Asian culture, he manages to capture a specific poetics in his videos, often characterized by long static shots in which real time seems to stand still. Instead, we are offered an endless loop, whose cyclical nature is enhanced by the sounds of the surroundings, especially the South Moravian "meadows and groves" of the author's birthplace.

Jolana Sýkorová is a Czech designer living in Amsterdam whose work straddles the boundaries between variable typography, calligraphy, and experimental font design. She studied at UMPRUM in Prague in Jiří David's Intermedia Confrontation studio and graduated from Petr Babák's Graphic Design and New Media studio. She has collaborated on projects for Google, M+, and the Galileo Reference Center, designs fonts for clients such as Antih Lab and Herbarium, and is also active in international font design. She is the author of the Jott font, which won a gold medal at the Grand Prix Stratégies du Design 2023.

Each of the authors contributed to the ANATOMY OF WILDNESS exhibition in their own way. Jiří David with his collage-style paintings, signifying the complexity of relationships and the world, and Pavel Jestřáb together with Jolana Sýkorová with original prints that could be silent rap as well as screaming poetry. The gallery space will be dominated by an invisible ecosystem where instinct, nervous reactions, soil maps, and perception meet. According to Jiří David, it is "a concrete physical existence associated with pain, restlessness, and desire; it is a space that is mostly hidden under a layer of cultural representations, but at the same time it is dynamic, open, and biology mixes with identity in it."

Admission is free.

We look forward to your visit.