The exhibition Tonus brings together the painter Roman Bicek and the sculptor Matej Gavula. Their works meet here in an associative register of forms. The counterpoint to Gavula’s objects – “bodies” without anatomy – is the anatomical explicitness of Bicek’s latest drawings and paintings. Gavula works with matter that he finds in the form of objects originally associated with architecture, design, or utilitarian function. He rewrites the history of their original purpose, arrives at other constellations, and creates their new “anatomies.” Bicek works with the matter of the image. In his latest drawings and paintings, he captures fragments of the human body and muscular tonus. He builds up, thickens, dissolves, and overlays the matter on the canvases. It flows in the form of fields of colour, from which a person or a bodily detail emerges here and there or disappears within them. In both approaches, there is a search for an optimal form, which is often achieved through transferring, rearranging, and repeatedly overpainting. The tension, transformed into the final immobile spatial or planar object, is present in the moment, situation, observation, volumes, fields of colour, strokes of the pencil across the paper, and, last but not least, in the statement itself.

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