Jakub Matuška/Masker: A Shocking Experience Behind the Curtain

The Czech Centre London presents A Shocking Experience Behind the Curtain, an exhibition of new paintings by Jakub Matuška aka Masker, the award-winning representative of new figurative painting in Central and Eastern Europe, renowned for detailed combinations of digital manipulations, airbrushes and masterly use of traditional drawing and painting techniques. The artist returns to the UK with a first major exhibition in more than a decade.

For Jakub Matuška, 2023 was a pivotal year. Technically and thematically, he reached a level of self-assurance he had been building toward for years, crafting his own stylistic universe as one of the most prominent figures on the Czech art scene. He celebrated his newfound confidence with an extensive monograph, A Man of Special Shapes, summarizing fifteen years of artistic development and maturation. This was accompanied by two outsized exhibitions: the critically acclaimed installation When the Wings of Swallows Obliterate a Granite Block from the Face of the Earth at the Castle Riding School in Hluboká nad Vltavou, and the popular exhibit The Sphere, Or You’ll Pass Ten Stones on the Way to the Abyss at Villa Pellé in Prague. Simultaneously he has prepared a larger presentation at the international stage, where he has been making his mark since his prolonged stays in London and New York, and through representation by galleries in Paris and Leipzig. In the spring of 2024, he launched a major installation in Tokyo’s Shibuya district, and now continues in London, taking over the both Kensington galleries of the Czech Centre.

Matuška's work has been recognised for its meticulous combination of hand-drawn sketches, digital interventions and acrylics applied on canvases with both sprays and brushes. His richly-detailed, vividly coloured figurative paintings, which explore existential yet poetic themes from contemporary urban life, balance the weariness and melancholy of its subjects with pastel lightness and implicit humour. The post-analog response to the intersection of the "old" and virtual worlds gives rise to a sophisticated interplay of digitally manipulated motifs expertly executed in traditional painting techniques, wholly revealed only in close, personal interaction with his large-scale canvases.

A Shocking Experience Behind the Curtain presents the selection of the last two series of Matuška’s paintings, most of which are being exhibited for the first time.

Here, the painter’s life themes, the difficulty of increasingly mediated communication, the tension between observable and inner worlds, or the struggle to bridge the gap between the conceptual and the material on the canvas, resurface with renewed urgency. Constantly examining his own experiences and the life in his immediate surroundings, while remaining acutely attuned to the movements within Western societies, he returns to the ups and downs of family life and its intersection with creative work.

The figures in these new paintings—now seemingly successful, middle-aged men—often retreat from the realities of their middle-class anchoring into the woods, the thickets of city parks, or the silence of a nocturnal studio. Tragicomic and vulnerable, instead of achieving the authority that masculine stereotypes assign to the peak of one’s productive years, they find themselves bumping against the limits of understanding with their partners and humanity in general.

But despite the melancholy and struggles with both personal and societal bipolar tendencies, the subject of the exhibition is not sorrow, but rather contemplative observation of inner processes, exploring the paradox of imagined versus seen reality on a single plane.

The transitions between worlds are formally conveyed through unexpected combinations of perspectives, cut-outs offering insights, or shifts in technique. Even smaller formats play with the magnified reproduction of quick, loose ballpoint pen sketches, switching between parts developed freehand, lighter shading or layering different strengths of linear strokes, gradually moving towards more dominant motifs built with quick, loose brushstrokes directly onto the canvas. In a first, the latest works now add watercolour effects into the large-format paintings, with finer strokes and pastel colours. As Matuška’s inner world once again gains the upper hand, the ongoing ethereal transparencies in his work allow us to see even closer.

Organised by the Czech Centre, curated by Michal Nanoru.

Exhibition dates: 8 October 2024 – 24 January 2025

Opening times: Tuesday – Friday, 10am – 5pm
(or by appointment via info@czechcentre.org.uk)

EXHIBITION OPENING &London launch of the retrospective monograph Jakub Matuška aka Masker: A Man of Special Shapes
Tuesday 8 October 2024, 6:30pm – 9pm