Without You / The Gallery of Modern Art in Roudnice nad Labem, CZ / 2024 * solo exhibition
The Gallery of Modern Art in Roudnice nad Labem, CZ
23.2.- 26.5. 2024
curator: Magdalena Deverová
* solo exhibition
Exhibited works:
I Don’t Exist When You Don’t See Me / 2019-2024
The exhibition’s centrepiece is Lowdown (2024). In this object, airport seats no longer serve their original function but sink into the liquid floor in the middle of the exhibition space. The floor absorbs the seating much as walls and earth did in Možný’s earlier variations on the same theme (Jelení Gallery, Prague, 2019; ProLuka Gallery, Prague, 2022). The act of immersing airport seats can be considered a physical manifestation of contradictory concepts, how the truth is obscured by baseness, lowness, injustice or degeneracy. In the artist’s words, it reflects a situation in which “things don’t turn out the way we imagined,” but it also references one of his favourite tracks by Iggy Pop. Like Jesse Darling, the most recent winner of the Turner Prize, David Možný uses ordinary urban furniture and waste, reshaping and recontextualising it. Both artists’ installations analogically reflect the instability of our times, pointing to the chaos of the world around us. The shiny black surface in which the object is immersed has another meaning too, for in our daily lives we are constantly confronted with black mirrors in the form of smartphone screens and computer monitors.
Related to the airport seats is an object called The Parcel (2021). At first glance an ordinary box with a somewhat enigmatic inscription reading “Fear God,” this is a flawless copy of a true consignment of airport seats from China, complete with this inexplicable and surprising message. Although it looks like an ordinary parcel, the illusion dissolves when we discover that the whole object is made of painted bronze. There are clear parallels here with Gavin Turk’s imitations of cardboard boxes (e.g. Box, 2002; Brillo, 2003), Jasper Johns’ Painted Bronze (1960) and Jeff Koons’ bronze objects from his Equilibrium series (1985).
Among the other objects at the Roudnice exhibition, a new readymade called Without You (2024), floating in midair (Možný likes to defy gravity), immediately draws the eye. In this unusual context and position, a printer ceases to be a mundane and uninteresting piece of office equipment. Moreover, it seems this impersonal object can come to life without any human intervention, for at regular intervals it emits a sheet of paper that records the time of the print job.
Možný’s video work is represented at the exhibition by The Border / Proxy Version (2019/2024). This seven-channel video in seven separate frames creates an interesting combination of fictitious narratives from what appears to be a random scene shot at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. In reality, however, these are staged photographs from socialist propaganda. This “carefree” scene takes place right by the heavily guarded border, in no-man’s land, where such a large group of people would not ordinarily have been allowed to move freely. Looking at this video installation with its seven animated, photograph frames, we are again witnesses to the divide between illusion and reality. We go back in time to a place that was denied its social role. This staged event confronts us with the power of manipulation.
As the creator of a new reality, David Možný, although from a different generation than today’s young artists, never ceases to fascinate with the freshness of his perspective and the contemporariness of his themes. Yet – and this must be emphasised – the powerful visual impact of his art does not obscure its depth and the important messages it bears. Možný’s environments (both real and virtual) are terrifyingly empty zones. Our absence (Without You) only makes them more eloquent on the consequences of human action.
Magdalena Deverová