SYMPLOKÉ

Opening on Thursday, 22 October 2026, at 18:00.

With art commentaries by Roberta Bielika, Julie Hayward and Frenzi Rigling.

Curated by Miroslav Haľák.

Foreign words, which as a rule discourage the wider public from reading art-scientific texts, should not be a tool of pseudo-intellectual display, but an irreplaceable aid for describing phenomena that lie outside everyday life. Art is precisely such a phenomenon in our lives, and so explaining what takes place, for example, in the photographs of Ivan Pinkava requires more than a basic vocabulary. If certain concepts, for example from the poststructuralist lexicon, are not used and repeated to the point of tedium merely as a fashionable mannerism, then the search for the right expression to describe complex relations within an artistic composition can direct us onto an adventurous journey through time and space, a journey of discovery. The exhibition of photographs by Ivan Pinkava also invites us on such a journey, because in trying to penetrate beneath the surface layer of his human bodies, accumulated materials and atypical heaps of objects, we move beyond the categories of simple descriptions of beauty.

In Plato’s late dialogue Sophist we encounter the notion of interweaving (symploké), which is unjustly overlooked in the theory of art. With the philosophical term symploké (“σύν” [syn-] – prefix: “with”, “together” or “jointly” / “πλέκω” [plekó] – verb: “to weave”, “to plait” or “to knit”) one can designate the mutual connection, for example, between objective reality and subjective idea. On the foundation of this word there thus takes place an encounter between the unreal and the knowable, but also an encounter between the abstract idea and the embodied form. These confrontations constitute the substance of every artwork. Ancient philosophy turned to the metaphor of textiles to emphasise the advantages of joining seemingly incongruous elements into a meaningful whole. Art often confronts us with the difficult task of uncovering, within the tangle of outward incompatibilities, the code of inner relations. It would, however, be a mistake to assume that every artwork has such a disposition, just as it would be naive to believe that every painting or sculpture necessarily wishes to express complex aspects of human existence. Artists weave from diverse threads of individual inspiration, yet the resulting fabric may also reveal their incoherence. All the more rare, therefore, is the discovery of a work whose strength lies in how the author has managed to weave an inwardly cohesive cloth from various yarns of thought.

The photographs of Ivan Pinkava are aesthetically appealing, yet their form is neither a mere self-serving constructive-compositional exercise nor a superficial conveyance of predictable content. Through the artistic language he has refined over the years, Ivan Pinkava creates visual texts with a recognisable authorial hand, yet only between the imagined lines, on a kind of intertextual plane, can one discover those rare connections, that is, the interweaving of surprising facts. The iconography of his works may tempt one to seek superficial analogies in art history and to simplistically decode the message of the nude figure, yet the fact remains that behind the stylised poses of the photographed figures and the still lifes with layered surfaces of various materials and textures lies a tension that is almost physically palpable. In dramatic lighting, bodies are staged just as much as banal textile fragments, crumpled fabrics, synthetic foams, chairs, furniture, plants or tarpaulins, boards, planks and beams. Anonymous spaces of a liminal character serve as the stage for the static moment of the interweaving of the concrete with the supernatural. It is fascinating how the photographs of Ivan Pinkava visualise the polarity between the form of objects and the content of thought. The result is never merely a trivial object, a mere snapshot of a roll of foam or a spread-out carpet. Beyond the materiality of each of Ivan’s objective constructions lies a poetic dimension of being.

It is astonishing how Pinkava manipulates human anatomy and, on the other hand, how he composes lifeless matter. In the extensive series of his nudes, which are in principle portraits of subjects, we find instead the essence of lifeless objectivity. It would not be right to claim that the male bodies on…