Fragments of the Day, Light of the Night

The exhibition by sculptor Dana Bartoníčková (1988) and painter Jakub Tytykalo (1984) invokes a vital inner ambivalence, a sense of the absurd, and a playful scepticism characteristic of the artistic generation born in Czechoslovakia during the 1980s. The consumerist exuberance of the free-spirited 1990s, having proliferated unchecked, finds itself in the second decade of the new millennium poised between the complex demands of sustainability and the spectre of collapse. On the horizon of development, anxious interrogations multiply, bound up with both the collective and individual destiny of humankind, whose consciousness and cognition encounter new thresholds of experience shaped by mass manifestations of self-alienation. Amid a fragmentation of values, memento-like echoes of the past emerge, while social dynamism loses its former sheen. The human relationship to space and time becomes increasingly fraught and problematised.

Into this framework enter the concrete sculptures and sculptural constellations of Bartoníčková, which operate through a reduction of the human body to an anthropological sign and a relational moment. Joy and vitality are here set directly alongside irony and scepticism. These elements dialectically intertwine within ritualised forms and staged festivities that transcend the suffocating monotony of everyday life. Matter itself is animated by both exuberance and sorrow—it rejoices and suffers, much like the human subject.

The paintings of Tytykalo, by contrast, emit signals from an imagined, timeless sphere in which the future is equated with the past. The human figure appears only as an absurd plaything, mediated through material or astral references—fragments, imprints, and traces. These paintings constitute a dreamlike, constructed meta-narrative of an absurd tenor, recounting the story of half-forgotten inhabitants of the Earth, upon whom the ever-expanding cosmos gazes with a calm, metaphorical eye. Physical presence, like death itself, is relativised; within this staged order of meaning, neither assumes any fundamental significance.

The title of the exhibition gestures toward the essential dialectic of day and night in the movement of human imagination. Stimulated by the heterogeneous fragments of the day, the human mind dreams at night. The logic of dreams alters the rules of the game: at times liberating one from banality, at others ensnaring one in unforeseen situations. Although we sleep at night because of darkness, our dreams paradoxically illuminate much.

Dana Bartoníčková (born 1988 in Pardubice) studied between 2009 and 2015 at the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Art and Design at the University of West Bohemia in Plzeň (studio of Milena Dopitová), and between 2013 and 2018 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (studios of Lukáš Rittstein, Jiří Příhoda, Dušan Záhoranský, and Pavla Sceranková). In 2017, she undertook a study stay at The Cooper Union in New York City, and in 2023 participated in the Magnus Art and J&T Residency in Karlovy Vary. Her work was most recently presented in the exhibition Three Dimensions of Love: Students of Sculpture under Lukáš Rittstein at the Gallery of Modern Art in Roudnice nad Labem (2025–2026) and at Galerie Portheimka in Prague (2026).

Jakub Tytykalo studied between 2008 and 2014 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (studios of Jiří Lindovský, Jiří Petrbok, and Jaroslav Róna). In 2013, he completed a study stay at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain. In 2017, he received the Art Prague Young Award. In 2024, The Chemistry Gallery, in collaboration with the BADOKH Foundation, published his first retrospective catalogue. His work was previously presented at Trafo Gallery in 2018 in a joint exhibition with Andrea Lédlová entitled Metaphysical Bedtime Stories, for which a publication of the same title was also issued.