The Asya Geisberg Gallery will open the inaugural exhibition at its new Tribeca location with Czech artist Jakub Tomáš, his frst US solo exhibition.
Tomáš situates his exuberant painting in sculpture and collage, using cardboard models and theatrical lighting imbued with his study of theatrical scenic design to generate enigmatic or absurdist scenes. The resulting fattened schematic faces are painted within illusively familiar environments, with a surprisingly friendly robot nearby.
"The Field Robot of Myself” presents Tomáš’s latest paintings that use the language of Cubism and Dadaism with influence from Czech puppetry and clay animation traditions to create absurd and surreal scenes. Tomáš starts each painting by creating cardboard models and collages using magazine cutouts and internet-based sources that he lights thematically. He creates new meanings by juxtaposing seemingly unrelated fragments. As Tomáš explains, “machines are not merely tools in my paintings but also partners or perhaps idols."
JAKUB TOMÁŠ The Field Robot of Myself March 8 - April 13, 2024
Asya Geisberg Gallery, 45 White Street, NYC
Artwork list:
More about the exhibition can be downloaded here:
Jakub Tomáš lives and works in the Czech Republic. He works mostly in a large scale, with enigmatic figures engaged in fictional rituals or bizarre relationships. Backgrounds suggest bland Communist-era buildings or flattened mockups of trees and landscapes. His heads veer from black marble Greco-Roman heads, to rudimentary masks with cut out eyes and mouths, to cartoonish hoods on top of anatomically accurate bodies. We sense a desire to capture a real scene or event, and a simultaneous disregard to adhere to only one interpretation. The strategies and quotations that Tomáš magically mixes all seem to play together; as in a dream where we don’t question how people jump across time and place which, in our awakened state, would not make sense.
Jakub Tomáš was born in Jihlava, Czech Republic, where he lives and works. He received a Master of Fine Arts in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Prague, and studied previously at the University of West Bohemia and the Institute of Art and Design in Plzeň, CZ. He has shown widely in the Czech Republic, with recent solo exhibitions at Oblastní Galerie Vysočiny, Jihlava; Stage Garden Gallery, Rožnov pod Radhoštěm; Městská Galerie, Týn nad Vltavou; Šopa Gallery, Košice; GAVU Cheb; Galerie Václava Špály, Prague; Nová Galerie, Prague; and NEVAN CONTEMPO, Prague; and international exhibitions in Austria, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom.
