Jakub Hubálek: Black and White Summer

Description

In recent paintings and above all drawings, Jakub Hubálek relinquishes his means of expression in favour of drawn automatism. He allows his own subconscious to speak. He is aware of his significance as eyewitness to events, without which the past is always lame and incomplete. And also a little bit black and white.

Jakub Hubálek is one of the important mavericks of the youngest generation of artists. He arrived on the Czech art scene in 2010, when he graduated from the Drawing Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. His relationship with drawing is crucial to his concept of the image, and it is in this relationship that all the features that make his work immediately recognisable and exceptional reside. Hubálek balances a focus on black and white tonality, which he developed in green monochromes, with a sense of contrasting forms within the framework of the visual structure. On the one hand the descriptiveness of the forms are on the boundary of the photographs he takes as his model, while on the other they are impulsive, expressive inputs that disrupt the perfect illusiveness of said descriptiveness. The tension between these two poles of expression (precision vs. gesture) creates a world characterised by a fluid, contradictory atmosphere, behind which we feel the ambivalent view of the introvert: sometimes critical, sometimes sober, but often subversive or captivatingly melancholic.

Black and White Summer, in graphic design of Dipozitiv Studio, contains a retrospective selection of works by Jakub Hubálek, together with an accompanying intro text by curator Petr Vaňous and an interview by Tomáš Poláček.

Pages: 200