Exhibitions Opening

We cordially invite you to the opening of the exhibitions Tadeáš Podracký: It Grows With You (MeetFactory Gallery) and Jozef Mrva ml.: Challenger Escape Plan (Kostka Gallery), which will take place on Thursday, January 29, at 6:30 p.m. Admission to the event is free. 

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Tadeáš Podracký: It Grows With You
MeetFactory Gallery
30. 1. – 19. 4. 2026 

Curator: Ján Gajdušek
Production: Nikol Hoangová
Architecture: Adéla Vavříková
Designer: Marko Čambor

 

The solo exhibition by multidisciplinary sculptor and designer Tadeáš Podracký, titled It Grows With You, presented in MeetFactory’s main gallery, will showcase the artist’s oeuvre from the past five years through several distinct series. In his practice, Podracký explores the human environment through objects that deliberately operate on the threshold between design and fine art. They draw on the “DNA” of functional artefacts (a mirror, chair, chaise longue, or chandelier), yet their final forms intentionally disrupt utility, treating function less as an end in itself than as an interface for communication with the viewer. Central to his work is speculative imagination—the question of what objects and architecture might look like if cultural and social development had taken a different course—alongside a process-driven approach in which ideas do not primarily originate on paper but rather “in the hands.” Podracký sets himself constraints, works through layering, and allows material and embodied decision-making to guide the process in pursuit of the “truthfulness” of the outcome, which matters more to him than a preconceived intellectual construct. His intense handcraft and embodied know-how serve as a critique of the frictionless digitalisation of production: technology (including robots) does not replace human input, but is “bent” to translate and reinterpret the imprint of the body. In recent years, this logic has also been informed by motifs drawn from local rituals and mythologies—his fascination with the uncanny persistence of traditions within an urbanised context—which he does not adopt illustratively, but rather as a model for thinking about how cultural archetypes shape behaviour and how they might, in turn, reshape the very objects that surround us.

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Jozef Mrva ml.: Challenger Escape Plan
Kostka Gallery
30. 1. – 19. 4. 2026 

Curator: Ján Gajdušek
Artistic and technical cooperation: Ondřej Doskočil
Production: Nikol Hoangová
Architecture: Adéla Vavříková
Designer: Marko Čambor
Graphic: Jakub Kučera

 

At Kostka Gallery, under the title Challenger Escape Plan, Jozef Mrva Jr. will present both his most recent and earlier painting in the form of an expansive spatial installation, developed in collaboration with Ondřej Doskočil. Mrva (b. 1988), a Prague-based artist, curator and educator, and a graduate of the doctoral programme at FaVU BUT in Brno, combines mathematical models, found imagery and speculative philosophy with digital media (especially 3D animation and video), drawing and installation. In his paintings, he repeatedly works with the motif of the knot and cyclical structures as both a visual and conceptual method. His installations incorporate collage techniques using recycled plastics, as well as objects and videos often built on metaphors of the entanglement of communication networks, logistics and capitalism. He also engages with the hidden infrastructures of the platform economy and their environmental and geopolitical consequences. His work has been shown, among others, at A Promise of Kneropy, Kvalitář, AMU Gallery (with Filip Kolychev), Galerie Kurzor, the Brno House of Arts, Boccanera Gallery, and at Biennale Warszawa.