Jáchym Šimek

Bio

Jáchym Šimek (b. 2000) views sculpture and relief as a theatrical space in which illusions, fragmentary stories and parallel narrative threads intertwine. His works are reminiscent of split-screen or layered visual planes that explore the audience’s willingness to accept the rules of an artificially created reality. He deliberately subverts traditional sculptural practices by imitating materials and utilising theatrical sets. He is interested in what reality can sustain before it begins to disintegrate or reveal its construction. In his work, he has long engaged with spectacle and illusion as structural components of contemporary reality, observing their visual manifestations and the emphasis on artificially created ‘epic conclusions’ as points of reference in an environment of information overload. He draws inspiration from set design, opera and the worlds of video games, which he regards as functional models of fragmentary and illusory space. From 2020 to 2023, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU) in Vojtěch Míča’s studio; from 2023 to 2026, he studied in the studio of Josef Bolf, Jakub Hošek and Nik Timková, where he also completed his degree.