Jakub Tomáš

A JOURNEY AROUND MY ROOM

Exhibition opening: 24. 6. 2020 / 18.00 hod. Exhibition's duration: 25. 6. - 24. 7. 2020 Exhibition's curator: Radek Wohlmuth

Artist Talk: 24.6.2020 / 6 p.m.

The title of the newest exhibition of one of the most prominent Czech painters of the middle generation, Jakub Tomáš (1982), directly refers to the title of a book by the French nobleman and writer Xavier de Maistre, who lived at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. During his forty-two-day house arrest, which punished him for participating in the fight, the man wrote a small volume of forty-two chapters called Voyage autour de ma chambre. Immediately after its publication in 1794, it became a bestseller and forever marked the philosophy of travel. The author sometimes seriously, sometimes with exaggeration, describes an alternative to a real journey through the countryside, but with the proviso that everything takes place only in a closed space of one’s own residence.

Xavier de Maistre offers his approach right at the outset as an opportunity to everyone who, for various reasons, cannot travel in the usual way. Although by the beginning of 2020 it may have seemed that in the third millennium its offer – at least in open Europe – with a few exceptions, a possibility of only a slightly decadent entertainment for a narrow circle of eccentrics, the circumstances of recent months have shown that the opposite is true. Jakub Tomáš understands the nobleman’s interior adventures as a metaphor for the current state. However, he does not mechanically project the place for his travels into the interior of his own apartment, he perceives it rather as a certain mental space. He first translates the ideas that take place within the mental space into models and only then paints according to them. His works from the quarantine period are presented within this exhibition.

/ Radek Wohlmuth

 

Jakub Tomáš (*1982) is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he studied under the guidance of Vladimír Kokolia and Jiří Sopek. On the Czech art scene, he profiles himself as a prominent painter who manages to update and transcend the traditional medium of hanged painting to the present. He has participated in many group and solo exhibitions at home and abroad.

 

Exhibitions of this gallery are supported by Slovak Arts Council.

Slovak Arts Council is the main partner of the project.

The project is supported by the Košice City.