Zbyněk Sedlecký (*1976, Ostrava) is one of the eminent Czech artists born in the 1970s who have long been exclusively devoted to the medium of painting. Alongside Josef Bolf, Daniel Pitín, and Lubomír Typlt, Sedlecký also succeeds in capturing and developing the contours of a generational feeling through his paintings, the outline of which is formed, on the one hand, by his experience with the totalitarian regime of socialist Czechoslovakia and, on the other hand, with the vibrant period of newly acquired freedom in the 1990s and the contemporary consumerism. As a graduate of painting under the guidance of Jiří Načeradský and Jiří Sopko, he also builds on the broader foundations of Czech painting, continuously developing and modifying them in new social conditions and relation to his own memory, static photography, to the motion picture, and to the accelerators of visual communication, which today are primarily social media.

Each painting by Sedlecký is to some extent an event frozen in time. The moment of stillness unifies and reconsiders the structure of what is seen. The viewer is released from the automatisms of perception that are associated with the movement of the body and consciousness. Stopping the moving image initiates a different "description" of the event because it stops our vision as well. Here, painting's means of expression take on their role, which, following the author's intention, model the image as either a distant situation or a close, private, intimate one. And these means bring a new, truly authorial dynamic to the static image, which ultimately leads to a rethinking of what we might call classical genres.

The exhibition is accompanied by the first partial monograph of Zbyněk Sedlecký in a graphic design by Pavel Tichoň. The editor of the book, which presents the creative development of the artist, is the exhibition curator Petr Vaňous.

Curated by Petr Vaňous

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