CT / Gallery / Jan Kostohryz, Alice Nikitinová, Hana Puchová: Should I take my shoes off?

Home is not only an inhabited or shared space, partitioned and bounded by walls. It is also a network of unwritten rules that divide the world into what is “inside” and what is “outside”. The threshold is more than an architectural detail; it functions as a liminal zone in which we cross the line between the public and the private. Here, a visitor becomes a temporary participant in an intimate order. The question “Should I take my shoes off?” is, in this sense, a small yet essential micro-ritual – a performative gesture by which we acknowledge the existence of a rule, one we are able to rely on precisely by submitting to it. It is an expression of attentiveness to the inner arrangement of things, values, and rhythms, granting the host the possibility to set the degree of sharing and allowing the guest to enter without violating the fragile hierarchy of intimacy.

The exhibition Should I take my shoes off? explores the home as a mutable stage through works by Jan Kostohryz, Alice Nikitinová, and Hana Puchová, where the inventory of everyday objects and the spatial layout generate a familiar field of quotidian situations. These transform the austere industrial spaces of MeetFactory Gallery into an imaginary apartment unit – one we enter not with a key but with our gaze. Each work here plays a double role: it shapes the literal, material structure of the apartment and, at the same time, its “human” layer, in which relational situations unfold that are familiar to us all. The paintings function as apertures onto personal memories – whether it be the sharing of a kitchen table, the hush of a holiday, or the chaos of moving – together composing a choreography of things that maintains their mutual distance while binding them through everyday use. As observers we cross a threshold that is at once real and imagined: we accept rules formed not only by the relationships among the exhibited artworks but, above all, by the artists as hosts, who slowly – through flashback-like fragments of looks and scenes – admit us into actual homes and carefully ration our voyeuristic curiosity. We are spectators and at the same time guests; this places subtle barriers before our gaze, reminding us that intimacy is always a conditional form of sharing. Each step in this notional apartment is thus a micro-etiquette of looking, returning us to the same experiences and situations that in all likelihood once unfolded without that external “gaze”. The pithy question “Should I take my shoes off?” thus remains present from the first to the last work—a small ritual of respect and curiosity that leads us through the space, from the entryway to the living room.

Jan Kostohryz (b. 1993) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he studied painting, figurative sculpture, and printmaking. In his figurative oil paintings and plaster reliefs he develops an unassuming poetics of everyday interiors and the banal moments of millennial life – from glimpses of shifting scenes within apartment interiors to holiday idleness – into which he almost imperceptibly introduces the disturbing element of insects as a banal yet existentially charged micro-threat. He works with the tension between the intimacy of personal space and its disruption, alternating painting with sculptural relief inflected by elements of the classical canon. He received the Kunstpreis der Leinemann-Stiftung for his diploma work (2018) and in 2021 was a finalist for the Critics’ Award for Young Painting (Cena kritiky za mladou malbu). Kostohryz teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague as an assistant professor in the Painting I studio led by Robert Šalanda.

Alice Nikitinová (b. 1979) is a painter of Czech-Ukrainian origin who, after attending an art secondary school in Kyiv, completed the painting studio led by Jiří Sopko at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. A precise observer, she depicts the poetics of banal objects and situations that unfold almost exclusively within the interior of her flat. She composes these still lifes – marked by a distinctive humour – into chromatically restrained fields, and alongside painting she occasionally works with spatial installation and illustration. In 2010 she was a finalist for the Jindřich Chalupecký Award, and she currently co-heads the Drawing Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague together with Matěj Smetana.

Hana Puchová (b. 1966) is a painter and occasional illustrator closely associated with the Ostrava art scene and the group “Přirození”. She graduated from Jiří Šalamoun’s Studio of Illustration and Graphics at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (1991–1997); after her studies she returned to her native city, where she has taught art education since 1997 and exhibits regularly. Her portraits of friends and still lifes from domestic interiors, rendered in a slow, layered hand, compose a personal yet humorous history of everyday rituals of care, memory, and intimacy. Together with theorist Jiří Ptáček, Puchová will lead the Painting I studio at the Faculty of Art, University of Ostrava.