Small Structures Are Beautiful vol II1
(etc. galerie in Uqbar Project Space)
February – April 2009
In cooperation with Prague's etc. galerie, uqbar project space presented the first solo exhibition of the young Czech artist Martin Kubíček. His drawing cycles and installations are based on personal impressions, moods and feelings, captured/gathered during his extensive journeys and condensed in texts and images. All his drawings are created digitally on computer, taking advantage of the possibilities of modern vector programs. He combines the resulting images, which are mostly based on travel photographs, with his own lyrics/texts to form a complex whole, meant to be read in a linear manner. Text plays an important role in Kubíček's work in general, and takes on the function of an image.
The exhibition 1280 km from Prague reflects Kubíček's interest in the relationship between text and image, and his penchant for a linear structure. The artist shows a series of 96 postcards-sized "romantic coloured prints," as he describes them, linked by the continous/consistent motif of a mosque. The impressions of the hundreds of different mosques Martin Kubíček encountered on his travels through South East Europe, Turkey and Iran provide the backdrop for a diary-like narrative. The individual prints represent autonomous art works, but are combined into a unit at the same time by their linear order in space and the narrative, which develops in fragments throughout the individual prints. The viewer is invited to browse this unusual book, and is asked: Did this really happen? Is it an authentic story? Or is it all invented and fictive? What is the relationship between the images and the text? Is there any link?
Martin Kubíček comments as follows: "I'm not interested in the story I tell in my texts. I could also write about something else. It is completely unimportant to me whether there is a main point or not. I'm rather looking for the condition of narrating itself. The story is actually exchangeable/replaceable and simple. The images seem to accompany the text, but they are not related at all. It is like when you try to talk about the immediate, or when you try to implant your story into a new and unrelated/incoherent context. In fact, it is basically a collection of romantic picture postcards, it's my mosque collection. There is no link between the text and the depicted. Nevertheless, the combination of text and image in the form of a postcard creates a certain atmosphere."
Marketa Vinglerova
1 1280 km from Prague is the second part of the exchange project between uqbar, Berlin, and etc. galerie, Prague, supported by the German-Czech Future Fund, the Cultural Administration of the Berlin Senate, the Danish Arts Agency and the Goethe-Institut Prague. With this project, uqbar begins a long-term series with the title Small Structures Are Beautiful, dedicated to exchange with non-profit spaces in Europe.
© 2007, etc. galerie
Kateřinská 20, Praha 2, Czech Republic / info@etcgalerie.cz
