IN PROGRESS: MICHAL CIMALA 24. 1.–2.3.2025

MICHLA CIMALA: BLAST WAVE 24. 1.- 2. 3. 2025

Michal Cimala (1975), sculptor, painter, designer and musician; due to his generational affiliation, which is characterised by the immediate experience of the Velvet Revolution and the regime change in 1989, he is one of the artists sensitively connected to his time and its transformational twists and turns. In 1989-1993 he graduated from SUPŠ in Turnov (goldsmith/silversmith) and in 1994-2000 from VŠUP (Metal and Jewellery Studio, prof. Vratislav K. Novák). From 2006-2024 he worked as an assistant in the Sculpture I studio (Jaroslav Róna, Lukáš Rittstein). He has had a number of internships and residencies abroad (Milan, Berlin, San Francisco, etc.). He is one of the founders and authors of the successful Trafo Gallery in Prague. Together with Petr Voříšek he is active in the music ensemble RoxorRM3N, which released a new album Vysočany in November 2024.

The exhibition for the space of Villa Pellé is a project of a balanced, contradictory generational feeling. Several conceptual levels intertwine in the installation. The dominant one will be the so-called black series of paintings from 2022-2024, thematizing “a slowly expiring scepticism even in the field of art”.

One of the main themes of Michal Cimala’s sculptures and paintings is the excitement and anxiety of the present, which is a prefigurement of an uncertain and darkening future. In Cimala’s eyes, the future can be anything between the intoxication of technological marvels, anxiety about the geopolitical situation, the human apocalypse and arid wasteland.

Michal Cimala’s work is characterised by a reflection on the 20th century avant-garde, its aesthetic and social experiments, which in retrospect appear not only artistically captivating, but also socially utopian and violent.