Jakub Matuška aka masker

Date of the event

2. 2. 2023 — 14. 5. 2023

Place of the event

Alšova jihočeská galerie

The original enfant terrible member of the Czech graffiti CAP Crew, Matuška, today, as one of the most successful artists of his generation, devotes himself primarily to painting. In his forties, he reaches the peak of his period of experimentation with the transfer of a sovereign drawing style to large-scale canvases, often using complicated techniques involving Photoshop and months of manual work with acrylics. A background in street art had already led him years ago to the use of spray and airbrush, the basic medium through which contemporary post-analog painting grapples with questions of flatness and depth, solid and fluid, assured and uncertain. Thematically, Matuška, on the other hand, swung through a wave of surreal exploration of the unreliability of one's own perception, spiritual crises and the shaky state of civilization to seemingly calmed scenes from the everyday life of a contemporary city person, reminiscent of his early work as a poetically funny glossator of worlds that he never felt fully a part of. However, whether he goes to a fairy-tale forest or under the palm trees of subtropical islands on his way to wisdom, the forecast always reports extremes.

The space of an enlightened middle state between common sense and a fever dream, a punk concept of painting rooted in multiple echoes of pop culture images and an exhibition concept combining formally demanding canvases with foreshadowing and a returning resonance in drawings, highlights the evocative installation created for the space of a romantic castle, the melting delusional landscape between Hokusai and Lada.