2024

concrete

Vojtěch Hrubant is a dexterous and masterful draughtsman; his drawings – diary-like records of his thoughts, ideas, and impulses from everyday life – reveal a gift for visual abbreviation, abstract shapes and anecdotal perspective. A printmaker by training, he currently works as a technical assistant at the printmaking workshop of the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, although he also likes to work with other artistic media as well. One of his first steps into three dimensions was to create plaster casts of linocut printing plates. His interest in the relationship between positive and negative in both two and three dimensions is confirmed by his simple prints and line drawings, which manifest a clear natural sense for physical form. These works also form the starting point for his recent reliefs made of concrete. At the same time, he has also discovered the possibilities of a primarily non-sculptural material – polystyrene panels, which he sculpts according to ideas first explored in drawings. Removing the polystyrene material from the surface, he thins the material, working with it – despite its specific texture – like a printing block. He sometimes exhibits low polystyrene reliefs on their own, while in other cases he casts them in concrete.

The latter process was also used to create his relief Kuthor, installed on the perimeter wall of the GASK gardens, in a bricked-up niche that marks the place where the historical path to St Barbara’s Cathedral used to lead. The abstracted world of the labyrinth of underground passages and the people working in them is inspired by the Kutná Hora Illumination in the GASK collection. It also refers to the entrance to the historical medieval tunnel leading towards the Jesuit College from the adjacent plot on the other side of the wall.