(RE)FRAMED

Exhibition is held within Fotograf Festival # 4 – “seeing is believing”.

The “Kvalitář” Gallery confirms its identity as a meeting point of contemporary art, architecture and design through the project of the trio of authors of Petr Dub, Marek Habr and Zdeněk Porcal. The exhibition’s concept represents appropriation approaches associated with a new attitude to the interpretation of Petr Dub’s long- running series entitled Reframed.

The central theme of this series consists in primarily the work or “reformatting” the medium of the classical suspension painting into an object on the borderline of a painting and object. The resulting work of art examines the current technical possibilities of the painting medium, openly reflecting the layout of the exhibition or architectural space with different social functions. In the instant case, however, searching for an optimal relationship between the arrangement of three-dimensional objects and specific installation possibilities goes beyond simple variations of different perspectives.

Petr Dub is well aware that the subsequent photographic documentation has only a limited capacity to mediate the viewer’s physical situation and becomes permanently independent as an autonomous form of the interpretation of reality. He does not perceive the moment when the photographer steps on stage as uniquely mechanical, and in this respect, he also understands the uniqueness of the activity of his colleague Zdeněk Porcal, with whom he has been cooperating on the Reframed series since 2011. Mutual cooperation has ultimately led to purely photographic outputs in which

Zdeněk Porcal interprets the whole series reversely using a simple figure of reading the figure and background. He uses the wooden lath coated with his colleague’s canvas in the series of dozens of shots as a photographic aid to measure the landscape and architecture.

The (RE)FRAMED exhibition finally reunites both approaches with an architectural (non-)solution of architect Marek Habr, co-founder of the “Kvalitář” Gallery and Studio. In the final installation, Marek Habr abandons the initial idea of the specific construction presenting the original “model and picture”, leaving the gallery space seemingly empty to facilitate understanding of different realities. As presented by the trio, the dimly lit gallery turns into a trap to reality, becoming a screening room where the still moments of the real world are confronted with their immediate artistic reflection.