In the dots series, Valentýna Janů’s work appears at once alluring and estranging: it pulls you into a polka-dot topology where patches on a surface come suddenly free of their stitches, sliding across and away; first convex, then concave, then holes – orifices like Kleinian portals twisting the inside outside, outside inside. A sexy topology: a dot encircles its own geometry and becomes spherical, its soft fabric gently exposing what it conceals. Circles grow an extra dimension and drop a ladder to a portal that transports you in here, out to your body.

It is at the site of the body that Matyáš Maláč’s series twists together its own sinewy topology, pulling you – a little less gently, but always playfully – into an incandescent, synesthesic world where shards of internet images pierce the folds of the psyche, which turns itself out onto a world buzzing and scurrying with wayward entities. The sensible is undone in the name of hyper-sensation, inscribed in words that shed themselves of signification yet seem all the more heavy with significance – signs of the times. A paranoid topology where a hole is a hole, but possibly much more… a mouth, holding worlds…

Valentýna Janů (*1994) is a Prague-based artist who, after graduating from FAMU in photography, continued her studies at the Intermedia II studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (Dušan Zahoranský and Pavla Sceranková). Janů’s practice uses objects, textiles, patterns, and the interplay of solid colors to shape the contours of a speculative environment that gently nudges its occupants toward questions about the interrelationship of sexuality, ecology, and the present mode of production. Winner of the prestigious Jindřich Chalupecký Award (2021), she has recently exhibited her work in Prague, Vienna, Budapest, and elsewhere.

Matyáš Maláč is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (2023) from Vladimír Skrepl’s Painting II studio. Maláč’s work is prolific in volume and range; while it centers painting, his practice spans multiple media. Drawing influence from a long list of artists and theoreticians, his work inquires into the status of art after the post-internet era, occupying a transitory zone between post-internet and new romantic tendencies. His compositions are expansive in form, almagamating multiple styles and techniques. Over the past years, his work has been displayed in Prague, Vienna, New York, Athens, Istanbul, and elsewhere

Text by Andrew Wilson