Taxonomia

The exhibitions opening in the Kvalitář gallery in 2023 focus on object-based work. The first one is a solo exhibition of sculptor Jan Kovářík, who is a very distinctive and strong personality of the Czech sculpture scene. His organic conception of objects is based on a deep effort to understand three-dimensional form as such. He concentrates his realizations in two areas, namely free-standing sculpture and hanging wall relief. An essential part of his work is the placement of sculptures in public space.The exhibitions opening in the Kvalitář gallery in 2023 focus on object-based work. The first one is a solo exhibition of sculptor Jan Kovářík, who is a very distinctive and strong personality of the Czech sculpture scene. His organic conception of objects is based on a deep effort to understand three-dimensional form as such. He concentrates his realizations in two areas, namely free-standing sculpture and hanging wall relief. An essential part of his work is the placement of sculptures in public space.

"Based on the principle of natural selection, it does not seem unlikely that all organisms that have ever lived on this planet could have descended from a single primordial form."

If we want to decode the visual key to the creation of Jan Kovářík's sculpture, we must first take a closer look at the first imaginary genealogical tree of his work. It was botany, a fascination with organic structures and a quest to understand the natural processes that were at the origin of his primary inspiration. The ability to stand still in time, to observe and then to transfer this altered information into a metamorphosed context is a fundamental pillar of Jan Kovářík's sculptural interventions. Also central to him was the observational experience of events in grass, the cultivation of moulds, or shrimp farming in aquariums, which are closed ecosystems with their own causal laws. Sculpture is the preeminent discipline of fine art precisely because of the formation of complex three-dimensional form. One of the most important aspects of Jan's work is the fact that it is based on the hand modelling of a basic object, whose subsequent surface is again hand-drawn. The common denominator of these sculptures is undoubtedly the pursuit of formal purity of form, which is very often intended to sophisticatedly evoke the morphology of the natural world, be it micro or macrocosmic structure. Indeed, molecular correlations, cell division or atomic clusters are often indistinguishable from cosmic nebulae or galaxies. It is this scale plurality that can be found in the work of Jan Kovářík. We are not sure what exactly the sculpture depicts, whether it is a scaled-down model of an existing organism or, on the contrary, an enlarged cellular-level structure. What we can be sure of, however, is that we are faced with an attempt to crack the code of the ingenious intricacies of the natural world.