Olbram Pavlíček | KORPSEPUNX: Stress Prosthetics
16/02/24–26/05/24

Olbram Pavlíček’s exhibition KORPSEPUNX: Stress Prosthetics at the White Cube of Hradec Králové’s Gallery of Modern Art presents the artist’s latest sculptures, prints, and drawings in which he subversively imitates the design of industrially manufactured products and, through their deconstruction, uncovers the ways in which they influence the lives of their users. Pavlíček subjects devices, symbols, and tools that we know from our everyday lives to aesthetic analysis, showing how their comfortable ergonomics, mathematically precise personalization, or clever visual design hide uncompromising demands. Often, they transform human integrity itself, for living as we do in a technological, consumption-defined environment, we have no control over “our” actions. Instead, we must adapt to the design-determined interfaces of non-human objects. Pavlíček has been exploring this subject in his long-term exhibition series KORPSEPUNX, in which he uses a variety of artistic formats to explore the effects that the complex systems of contemporary societal power have on the individual.

At the exhibition, his work engages in a dialogue with Mikuláš Medek’s Attempt at a Portrait of the Marquis de Sade III (1969) from the gallery’s collections. Like Pavlíček, Medek observed the existential conditions of his era and, with a critical sense of perspective, portrayed the (often unclear, absurd, or surreal) impacts of a technologically organized society on the individual. Both artists show, each in their own peculiar way, that (post)industrial (post)modernism exposes us to such strong pressures that its effects distort not only individual emotions but (de)form our very bodies and life functions.

Olbram Pavlíček (*1993) earned his bachelor’s degree from the Supermedia Studio at Prague’s Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design, where he also earned a master’s degree from Jiří Černický and Michal Novotný’s painting studio. Working with sculpture, drawing, and printmaking, Pavlíček analyzes contemporary “corporate-industrial” aesthetics to reveal the ways in which the design of industrially produced products and technologies influences their users’ inner experiences and physical integrity. He has shown his work at numerous established galleries in the Czech Republic (City Surfer Office, Prague; Berlínskej Model, Prague; Galerie PAF, Olomouc; Galerie NTK, Prague), as well as at many foreign institutions (Funkhouse Berlin, Berlin; HotDock Project Space, Bratislava; Werkschauhalle, Leipzig; Fotopub Project Space, Ljubljana). He is also a co-founder of Proto Gallery Systems, an internationally active group of artists and curators.

The exhibition was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the Statutory City of Hradec Králové.