Forsythia
Group Exhibition
HIDDEN Bořivojova
5. 6. 2025 / 20. 6. 2025
Opening: 4.6. 2025, 18:00
Guided Tour: 20. 06. 2025, 18:00
As part of our ongoing Best of AVU initiative, HIDDEN Gallery has selected a group of emerging voices from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Forsythia brings together artists who have not yet exhibited with HIDDEN and whose work resonated with us for its urgency, intuition, and depth. This exhibition is both a reflection on renewal and a celebration of what’s quietly taking root in the next generation.
The exhibition title draws inspiration from the ornamental plant Forsythia intermedia, commonly known as “golden rain.” Blooming among the first in spring, it symbolizes hope and new beginnings. The show presents emerging talents from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague—especially those who have not yet exhibited at HIDDEN Gallery. The name also alludes to the myth of Danaë, who was impregnated by Zeus transformed into golden rain, giving birth to the hero Perseus. This serves as a metaphor for the notion that both life and AVU students always find their own path.
In the film Contagion, Forsythia appears as a false cure touted as an effective remedy against the deadly MEV-1 virus. Similarly, Arthur Schopenhauer believed that aesthetic experience could provide temporary relief from the suffering caused by the irrational force he called the “will to live” (Wille zum Leben). In this view, art becomes an anesthetic against the pain of a base existence, one tormented by material desires, primal urges, and a hedonistic thirst for bodily pleasures. Yet this spiritual refuge is always fleeting, and we awaken once again “in the everyday parasite, / that miserably drags another day through the profane noise of the street,” as the decadent poet Karel Hlaváček wrote in his poem Vampire.
Golden rain also symbolizes tears—artists suffer for their work so they can “weep gold.” The idea of transforming pain into beauty references the alchemical stage of nigredo or the “black phase,” which represents death, deconstruction, and decay. This is the symbolic beginning of transformation, during which both matter and soul are purified, descending into darkness to be reborn—ultimately forming the Philosopher’s Stone, through which one may create the elixir of life: a substance that rejuvenates, resurrects, and grants immortality.
The Forsythia bush buds in spring and symbolically dies in autumn, only to be reborn the following year—an endless cycle of genesis and finis, which Goethe metaphorically compared to rain and the human psyche: “The soul of man is like water: it comes from heaven, rises to heaven, and must again fall to earth, ever circling.” Whether we seek in art a Schopenhauerian solace from existential pessimism, an Aristotelian expression of human emotion and experience, or a manifestation of metaphysical and aesthetic ideals in the spirit of Immanuel Kant, new names and artworks will always reemerge, reaching their resilient shoots skyward—trying to link the earth to the heavens. All of it in a never-ending desire to attain the “absolute spirit,” arriving at self-determination in and for itself (An-und-für-sich).
– Kamil Princ
Ivan Lendiaiev
These paintings are part of a five-part series titled Girls, made using a tattoo machine to draw directly onto canvas. The method is deliberate: a tool meant for skin is redirected onto fabric—introducing both intimacy and discomfort into the act of mark-making.
Nika Brazhnyk
Nika Brazhnyk’s folding screen presents a silent procession of performers: Pierrot, Harlequin, and other half-imagined characters who walk the line between theatre and myth. The figures are suspended in gesture—poised, collapsed, drifting—as if caught between acts or emotions.
The work meditates on duality: joy and melancholy, expression and concealment. Pierrot and Harlequin appear not as opposites, but as reflections—each emotion containing the seed of its twin. The screen itself, traditionally used to divide or shield, here becomes a stage: revealing through fragmentation rather than narrative.
Painted in warm, earthy tones with restrained movement, Brazhnyk’s figures feel timeless yet fragile. Their drama is not theatrical but interior—a quiet play of masks, longing, and delicate posture.
Anežka Hubatková
Anežka Hubatková’s painting cycle unfolds as a quiet journey through intimacy, distance, and the fragile spaces in-between.
In Mother, a blurred procession trudges across an ochre plain toward a modest canvas shelter. A rough wooden fence divides the wandering figures from the two silhouettes within—presumed mother and child—turning the landscape itself into a paradox of refuge and exclusion. Soft, diffused brushstrokes suggest a pilgrimage across emotional terrain where protection and separation coexist.
A Couple shifts the focus from collective memory to the charged bond of two individuals. Clad in vivid red, the figures melt into a warm earth-toned ground, their joined hands forming a gesture at once tender and tentative. Faces dissolve at the edges, hinting at fleeting glances and unspoken thoughts, while the paint itself seems to pulse with the tension between closeness and autonomy.
Together, these works reveal Hubátková’s sensitivity to the ways we carry—and negotiate—our relationships. Whether across open land or within a single embrace, her paintings trace the invisible borders that bind us, asking where comfort ends and yearning begins.
Anna Helová
Rather than a live sitting, this portrait was composed from a photograph of a close friend—Helová’s practice of mining still moments for her work. The tilted head and closed eyes suggest a moment of rest captured in time, while her painterly rhythm translates the photo’s snapshot quality into layered strokes of oil and acrylic. The red hair and textured sweater emerge through Helová’s characteristic impasto, turning a simple image into a meditative study of color, form, and memory. Here, the photograph serves as a starting point; the painting becomes an independent experience of quiet presence, filtered through the artist’s internal cadence.
Dominika Fišerová
Dominika Fišerová literally transforms landscape into substance. In her latest series, she mines the red earth clay of the Podkrkonoší region—rich in iron and memory—and grinds it into a fine pigment. This elemental material is then mixed with oil and applied to canvas, paper, and sculptural reliefs in a quietly ritualistic process. For Fišerová, color is not a symbol but a residue: something that clings to skin, shoes, and memory alike. What begins as raw pigment becomes a tactile language, translating place through touch. Her installation unites prints, soil-based paintings, and low-relief sculptures, each bearing the slow rhythm of erosion and return. Here, red is elemental rather than decorative, evoking both beauty and gravity, support and sorrow—just as the Podkrkonoší landscape itself.
Klára Hartlová
In this panel, Hartlová explores the fragile border between remembrance and erasure. By layering intense ultramarine fields with embedded fragments of moss and root, she evokes a space where the exterior landscape and inner recollections blur. The hanging branches and collapsed forms gesture toward absence—the body is never shown, yet deeply felt—inviting viewers into a reverie where memory slowly dissolves and is reborn.
Klára Korbelová
In this large-scale canvas from the She and I series, Klára Korbelová orchestrates a collision of memory fragments, bodily textures, and psychic residue. Disparate forms—a lace sleeve, a tiled floor, a hovering hand—float across a compressed visual field, layered in vibrating patterns and dense chromatic contrasts.
Unlike the first part of the diptych, which leans into the suffocating gravity of addiction, this second panel offers an ambiguous comedown. The palette is warmer, even playful in places, but the objects feel detached—spectral. A velvet curtain, a tilted box, and circular motifs hint at the afterglow of intoxication, now emptied of presence.
Here, Korbelová doesn’t narrate; she composes. Each element becomes a signal—part domestic, part symbolic—shaped by repetition and fragmentation. What remains is not a scene, but a state: the moment when memory has lost its timeline and the self drifts through patterned remnants, searching for coherence.
Leonard Železo
Leonard Železo transforms a social-media trope into a quietly unsettling portrait. Under classical studio lighting, two greyhounds stand draped in patterned scarves and tinted lenses, their stiff poses exposing an absurd cruelty. Drawing on his own queer experience, the artist sees himself in their unhappy faces, pressed into roles they never chose, and invites us to share in their discomfort.
By elevating these Instagram snapshots into solemn oil paintings, Železo asks viewers to confront the silent suffering behind staged performance. The dogs become stand-ins for our own awkwardness, reminding us that dignity and unease often walk side by side—even when we don’t ask to be seen.
Matyáš Kořínek
For Matyáš Kořínek, landscape is less a genre than a psychological state. Painted from memory, this scene resists specificity—it could be anywhere. A river reflects not the sky but the inside of the painter’s chest: turbulent, glowing, streaked with hesitation.
Kořínek works without a script. The process is rhythmic, intuitive, almost musical—built from repeated gestures until the surface starts to breathe. Here, the land is quiet but unstable. The water feels like a signal. Light moves like a mood.
Anastasiia Lisnycha
This modest relief—part of Lisnycha’s ongoing Garden of Thoughts—casts a single dove against a stylized checkerboard ground. Rendered in soft plaster and tinted pigment, the bird becomes both inhabitant and emblem of the mind’s inner orchard: fragile, transient, yet marked by quiet presence.
Just as her triptych transforms thoughts into sculpted flora, this little “messenger” suggests the fly-away nature of ideas. It reminds us that each passing notion, like a bird in flight, leaves its subtle trace on the cultivated landscape of our consciousness.
