PETR BOHÁČ, JAN MIKO, KUBA TAUŠ: UR LINIE

Date: 02.04. - 15.04.2019

The exhibition consists of paintings and artefacts by three artistic outcasts, Jan Miko, Kuba Tauš and Petr Boháč, who are united by a search for invisible connections and the awareness that loneliness is not caused by the absence of other people, but by a loss of meaning. The name UR-LINIE, translated from German, means the original line or also the original outline or the line of inheritance. All these meanings refer to something original that remains hidden today and that needs to be rediscovered. UR-LINIE are powerful correspondences that connect the visible with the hidden, the voiced with the concealed, the real with the mythological, the contemporary with the archaic, and the temporary with the infinite.

Such correspondence can be found in the paintings of Jan Miko, who has long been involved in painting underground railways. In the past two years, he has focused primarily on the architecture of the New York and Berlin subways. He is following on from his well-known series of paintings inspired by stations in Paris. In addition to these industrially abstract paintings, he creates collages that have been drawn over and in which artefacts relating to the Berlin U-Bahn appear.

For the last five years the sculptor Kuba Tauš, a graduate of the Sculpture Studio at UMPRUM, has been involved in the creation of lighting objects and installations. In principle, these are re-designs of lamps and chandeliers from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, which, after work has been done on them, become unexpected sculptures. Kuba Tauš behaves towards the lighting objects he finds like a responsible surgeon or like Rabbi Jehuda Löw, creating the Golem monster. The result is a mishmash preserving the original essence of the design. The exhibition also features sculptures of mythical figures made from steel and other metals, where everyday things can be recognized.

Petr Boháč is principally known in the theatre genre, where he is a member of the international Spitfire Company, which has achieved success in the Czech Republic and abroad. His artistic activity is almost unknown to the wider public. The exhibition will present paintings from his series Too Thin A Line, which are made using photo assemblies, liquid epoxy resin, chalk and oil paints. In his works of art, he is like a modern archaeologist searching for the original aura depicted in old photographs and he attaches the mythological size of modern abstract canvases to them.