This exhibition explores the contrasting yet intertwined temporal sensibilities of Františka Gilman and Ján Mančuška. Their shared history and divergent artistic visions chart a dialogue between continuity and interruption across personal and cosmic timescales.
Thursday, May 15, 6:00 PM | Exhibition opening with Františka Gilman and Christian Rattemeyer | REGISTRATION
Saturday, May 17, 5:30 PM | guided tour of (Dis)Connective Time with Františka Gilman and Christian Rattemeyer + screening of You Will Never See It All | INFO | REGISTRATION
(Dis)Connective Time brings together the work of Františka Gilman, a Czech artist based in Prague and New York, and Ján Mančuška, a Slovak-born artist who lived and worked in Prague and Berlin. The two studied in Prague together and remained friends.
Inspired by Gilman’s expansive drawing series Connective Time, the exhibition title further reflects on temporal disruption, removal, and delay–recurring themes in Mančuška’s practice. While Gilman’s sense of historical belonging is one of continuity with the cosmos, Mančuška’s is one of interruption and blockage of the physical being in the world.
This is the first time their work is presented together in a two-person exhibition. Curated by Christian Rattemeyer. Exhibition architecture by TAKATINA studio. Graphic design by Jan Šerých. Special thanks to Andrew Kreps Gallery.
Gilman’s drawings are precise, exacting, and labor-intensive compositions of circles, lines, and shapes—reminiscent of arterial networks, tree rings, the veins of leaves, or the topographies of riverbeds. They remind us that abstract forms, born from the procedural act of drawing and the repetition of small gestures, exist on a continuum with the natural world. These forms inhabit a “connective time” that spans geological epochs.
Throughout his career—cut short by a rare blood disease—Mančuška remained keenly aware of his own fleeting life span. He understood the involuntary gaps in his production, caused by recurring illness, as expressions of a broader temporal dislocation: a chronological stutter echoed in his artistic exploration of blind spots, hidden spaces, misremembered moments, and the unspoken.
Františka Gilman (born in 1973, Prague) lives and works in New York and Prague. She studied painting and new media at the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU) in Prague, at the San Francisco Art Institute, and at Cooper Union in New York. Her studio-based work ranges widely from large-scale oil painting to photography, drawing, and sculpture installations, often addressing questions of artifice, duality, and the limits of formal representation. Her work has been shown at many museums, galleries and independent spaces across Europe and the United States. In addition to artmaking, she writes about art and culture and curates exhibitions and performances.
Ján Mančuška (1972–2011) was a Slovak-born artist based in Prague, known for his visual art, filmmaking, and writing. He exhibited widely, including at the Stedelijk Museum, MoMA, and the Venice Biennale, and held solo shows at venues like Andrew Kreps Gallery and Kunsthalle Basel. His work has been featured in retrospectives across Central Europe and is held in major collections such as MoMA, the Centre Pompidou, and City Gallery Prague.
Christian Rattemeyer is an independent curator, writer, and translator and the executive director of ARTS&REC, an artist residency program in upstate New York. Previously, he served as the director of SculptureCenter, in Long Island City, New York (2019-2020), and the Harvey S. Shipley Miller Associate Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (2007–2019).
At MoMA, Rattemeyer curated and co-curated the exhibitions SURROUNDS: 11 Installations (2019), Unfinished Conversations: New Work from the Collection (2017), Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America 1960–1980 (2015), and Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan (2012), among others. Rattemeyer worked as Curator at Artists Space (2003-2007) and has worked for Documenta11 (2002), documenta X (1997) and documenta IX (1992) in Kassel, his hometown. He has published many essays and books on contemporary art, including Exhibiting the New Art: When Attitudes Become Form and Op Losse Schroeven, 1969, Afterall Publishers, 2010.
