CT / Kostka Gallery | Julius Reichel: Blood Inheritance

Julius Reichel's solo exhibition at Kostka Gallery presents an artist who – from his beginnings in graffiti through interventions in public space to paintings and objects – has always worked on the edge of meaning. An encounter with his works tends to follow a similar course: we take them in, a first meaning comes to mind, yet on closer inspection the same object shows itself from a different angle and offers a second meaning, one that casts doubt on the first or overturns it outright. This reversal is thus not a side effect, but the artist's method.

The central element of the installation is a monumental spatial web knotted together from hundreds of kilograms of discarded textiles, making full use of Kostka's verticality. Its tendrils stretch high above our heads in every direction, transforming the gallery into a labyrinth of passageways and sightlines. We do not walk past the work, but through it. With this tangle of rags and clothing, its junctions formed by knotted sleeves and trouser legs, Reichel points to the technological, media, political and other systems that surpass us and whose full reach we are unable to see. We can read it as a metaphor for the manipulation of society, or of particular strata within it. The clothing from which the structure is tied was discarded as unsellable even by second-hand shops, and so has reached the definitive end of its journey. And yet there are also brand-new pieces here, tags still attached, whose journey ended before it ever began. It would be hard to find more vivid evidence of wastefulness than the planetary circulation of textiles, which ends up in vast landfills in Ghana or in the Chilean desert.

In relation to the objects on the walls, the question arises of how far we are looking at a work of art and how far at the architecture of the exhibition. The artist has employed this ambivalence since the very beginnings of his practice – one of his earliest performative actions was the wrapping of textiles around a tree beside the E55 road, which he then perceived as an intervention into the "data stream of people" passing through the landscape. At Kostka, the same situation is inverted – the data stream has materialised, and it is we who find ourselves inside the web. The artist also returns repeatedly to the gradual tying and interlacing of webs of recycled textile strands, a process present in several of the hanging works on display. Reichel parodically calls his creative approach "5G painting", which he explains as painting about the "spirit of the age" – about the building of a planetary network whose workings and direction we do not understand.

Arranged across the walls is a series of the artist's most recent objects. These were made largely at the family farmstead near Kaplice in South Bohemia – while his Prague studio serves Reichel for painting, in the countryside he devotes himself mainly to working with wood and textile. At the core of these works are found objects – deckchairs, cut-out sections of wire fencing, shelves, floorboards, or worn-through trainers that have walked all the way around Mont Blanc. What unites them is a trashy, crooked cottage-core aesthetic, close to the improvised carpentry of Czech weekend cottages, combined with the lightness of the readymade and a sarcastic, at times subversive humour. The smile of Reichel's smileys is, after all, ambiguous, and we cannot be sure it does not amount to the outright trolling of his own audience. The same ambiguity runs through the theme of the frame, to which the artist consistently returns. Sweaters, pieces of a bed and torn-out wire fences are image and object at once, while a child's drawing set into one of the hanging readymades seems to claim that it alone is the artwork, everything else mere framing.

The condition to which Reichel's work responds is one he has, since 2020, described as "psychical pollution": alongside the pollution of the outer environment there is also the pollution of our psyche by the ballast of digital content we consume without pause. Several drawings feature the artist's characteristic handwriting, which grew out of a bitter personal experience of the education system from the position of a pupil with dysgraphia, for which he was punished throughout his life. Yet Reichel managed to forge this disadvantage into a creative method of his own, and so he often fills his paintings with a thicket of texts, hashtags and symbols he thinks of as carriers of data.

High in one corner of the gallery, an illustration of a ballistic missile in flight appears on the wall, descending towards the textile structure below. It can be seen as a reminder of the current wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran and across Africa – an image of the total destruction we are capable, as a species, of inflicting upon one another. The exhibition can thus be read as a grand spectacle, or as a precisely constructed trap in which the initial awe gradually breaks down into layers concerning manipulation, extractivism, war, and what we have inherited and what we will pass on. Julius Reichel deliberately weaves these levels of meaning into a single web, leaving it to the audience to find their bearings within it – even though it is a game lost from the outset.

Julius Reichel (b. 1981, Kaplice) lives and works in Prague and in South Bohemia. From 2007 he studied in Milan Knížák's studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (AVU); in 2016 he graduated from the Studio of Intermedia Confrontation led by Jiří David at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (UMPRUM), and since 2023 he has co-headed the Painting Studio II at AVU together with Milan Mikuláštík and Aleš Zapletal. Alongside group exhibitions in the Czech Republic and abroad, his solo shows to date include NoD Gallery (2018, 2019), the House of the Lords of Kunštát in Brno (2019), Karpuchina Gallery (2021) and Václav Špála Gallery (2023). His first monograph, Budoucnost je děsivý místo (The Future Is a Frightening Place), was published in 2020.

Julius Reichel: Blood Inheritance
Kostka Gallery 

14. 8. – 4. 10. 2026 
Opening: 13. 8. 2026

Curators: Tereza Havlovicová & Ján Gajdušek 
Production: Nikol Hoangová 
Graphic Designer: Jakub Kučera 
PR: Zuzana Kolouchová, Filip Pleskač
Installation: Tereza Kontúrová, Prokop Václavík, Kateřina Vachová, Antonín Závodný

Special thanks to Oanel Bachelard (FR), Corentin Mornet (FR).
Thanks to art re use (Jan Vincenec) and Sue Ryder (Jan Dominik) for their support.