Imago / exhibition

(from Latin imago – image, representation) Imagination is the human capacity to evoke mental images or “pictures,” which may relate to prior experience as memories (“reproductive imagination”), but can also transform this “material” in various ways to create new images (“productive” or “constructive imagination,” fantasy). The emphasis lies in the fact that, unlike perceptions, these images are purely mental and are not (yet) expressed in words.

The exhibition project IMAGO brings together the work of three artists—Richard Nestler, Matouš Marek, and Marie Ladrová—who all studied in the Intermedia Studio of Milan Knížák at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (AVU). After years of working independently within the field of contemporary art, they reunite in a collective exhibition whose central theme is the subconscious, dreams, and imagination—phenomena that have become key elements of their individual practices. All three are also engaged in pedagogical work.

Richard works with charcoal drawing as a medium that enables immediate visual improvisation. He creates pictorial worlds that emerge directly from the stream of consciousness, without prior construction—records of mental landscapes, visual diaries of the subconscious.

Matouš, a clinical art therapist, focuses in his painting on inner emotional states, translating them into images that balance on the threshold between abstraction and psychological record. His works arise both as a process of personal reflection and as an exploration of the therapeutic potential of the image.

Marie Ladrová has long been engaged with working with dreams, which she transforms into large-scale watercolors and objects. In doing so, she employs obsolete or disappearing technologies alongside natural materials such as fungi and plants.