SYMPLOKÉ / ΣΥΜΠΛΟΚH

Opening on Thursday, October 22, 2026, at 6:00 PM.

With artistic comments by: Robert Bielik, Julie Hayward, and Frenzi Rigling.

Curated by Miroslav Haľák.

Foreign words, which usually deter the general public from reading art-scientific texts, should not be a tool for pseudointellectual exhibitionism, but an indispensable aid for describing phenomena that transcend everyday life. Art is precisely such a phenomenon in our lives, and therefore, to explain what is happening, for example, in Ivan Pinkava's photographs, a basic vocabulary is not enough. If certain concepts, for instance from the post-structuralist lexicon, are not used and repeated ad nauseam merely as a fashionable mannerism, then the search for the right expression to describe complex relationships within an artistic composition can direct us on an adventurous journey through time and space, on a journey of the adventure of knowledge. The exhibition of Ivan Pinkava's photographs also invites such a journey, for in an effort to penetrate beyond the surface layer of his human bodies, accumulated materials, or atypical piles of objects, we transcend the categories of simple descriptions of beauty.

In Plato's later dialogue Sophist, we encounter the concept of interweaving (symploké), which is unjustly neglected in art theory. The philosophical term symploké (“σύν” [syn-] – prefix: “with,” “together,” or “jointly” / “πλέκω” [plekó] – verb: “to braid,” “to intertwine,” or “to weave”) can denote the mutual connection, for example, between objective reality and subjective imagination. On the basis of this word, therefore, an encounter takes place between the unreal and the knowable, but also an encounter between an abstract idea and a materialized form. These confrontations, moreover, form the substance of every work of art. Ancient philosophy used a textile metaphor to emphasize the advantages of combining seemingly disparate elements into a meaningful whole. Art often presents us with the difficult task of uncovering, in the tangle of external incompatibilities, the code of internal interdependencies. However, it would be a mistake to assume that every work of art has such a disposition, just as it would be naive to assume that every painting or sculpture necessarily wants to express complex aspects of human existence. Artists weave from diverse threads of individual inspirations, but the resulting fabric can also reveal their disparity. It is therefore all the more precious to discover a work whose power lies in how internally coherent a fabric the author managed to weave from various skeins of thought.

Ivan Pinkava's photographs are aesthetically captivating, yet their form is not merely a self-serving constructive-compositional exercise, nor a superficial mediation of predictable content. With an artistic language he has perfected over the years, Ivan Pinkava creates visual texts with a recognizable authorial handwriting, but it is only between the imaginary lines, on a kind of intertextual level, that those rare connections, that interweaving of surprising realities, can be discovered. The iconography of his works may lead one to seek superficial analogies from art history and to try to simply decipher the message of the naked figure; however, the fact remains that behind the stylized poses of the photographed figures and still lifes with layered surfaces of various materials and textures lies an almost physically tangible tension. In dramatic lighting, bodies are staged in the same way as banal textile fragments, draped fabrics, synthetic foams, chairs, furniture, plants, or tarpaulins, boards, planks, and beams. Anonymous spaces of a liminal character serve as the scene for a static moment of interweaving the concrete with the supernatural. It is fascinating how the polarity of the form of objects and the content of ideas is visualized in Ivan Pinkava's photographs. The result is never merely a trivial object, a mere shot of a roll of foam or a spread 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 inanimate matter. In the extensive series of his nudes, which are in principle portraits of subjects, we find, on the contrary, the essence of inanimate objectivity. It would not be correct to claim that the male bodies in...