Artist: Olbram Pavlíček

Title: KORPSEPUNX: Stress Prosthetics

Curator: Jiří Sirůček

In dialogue with Mikuláš Medek

Venue: GMU, Hradec Králové

Photos: GMU, Olbram Pavlíček

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.