Incubator Gallery

The Incubator Gallery is located on the ground floor of Sutnar Faculty building. The gallery is an open format space: available to students and artists, a space that welcomes experimentation, workshops, film presentations and theory classes, a space that is transformable and has windows for walls. Each year, Incubator Gallery participates in the One World Festival with a curated exhibition that supports the theme of the festival, and has hosted one-man exhibitions of Zdeněk Fránek, Adam Železný and Radovan Kodera, as well as, group exhibitions with the studios of Interactive Design and Sculpture and Space and others.

Land-art works “intergrowing” from country to country, created as part of a Czech-Bavarian cross-border project, were presented in a collective exhibition. The travelling exhibition emphasizes the need for a dialogue about the significance of land art and encourages its development among young artists. Starting a debate about art that is disappearing is more important than you might think. In most cases, land art seems to be one of the very few art forms which oppose literally all commercial tendencies, present a challenge for the preservation of artworks and question institutional exhibition formats. How to display art which has been created for outdoor presentation – or, more precisely, which exists, in its essence, in an innate relationship with nature? The impressions from land-art installations are conveyed to the visitors through photographs. 

In 2018, students of the Sculpture and Space Studio, headed by Jiří Beránek and Benedikt Tolar, added a set of objects called “No Place Left" to the newly built land-art trail close to the Klenová Castle near Klatovy. Another four artworks were created around Klenová as part of a Czech-German sculpting symposium. In 2019, the symposium took place on the other side of the border, in the German town of Vilseck, and further artworks were created along the river Vils. Due to their artworks in Klenová and Vilseck, four other artists from the Czech Republic and Germany, Tereza Fišerová, Kateřina Kubalová, Hanna Regina Uber and Herta Wimmer-Knorr, were invited to participate in the project. A symbolic highlight of the whole process was a piece of land art created in the vanished village of Bügellohe near Schönsee according to a design drafted by the studio head Benedikt Tolar.

The exhibition, which took place at the Incubator Gallery, presented photographs taken by the students of the Studio of Photography, headed by Vojtěch Aubrecht, capturing the above-mentioned unique artistic landscape interventions both at the Klenová Castle and in Bügellohe. The spatial arrangement of the photographs in the exhibition premises was planned by the curator Jan Van Woensel. The exhibition included also the presentation of a publication of the same name, which was created by the heads of the Master’s degree Studio of Graphic Design, Rostislav Vaněk and Kristina Fišerová, and which focuses on the said artistic project as well as the historical development of both locations in Germany and the Czech Republic.

In his work, Adam Železný (born 1986) puts emphasis on the process, which places his creations on the border between applied and fine arts. He loves working with various materials, particularly natural ones, which is closely linked to the processing and handicraft methods he applies. Already as a student of the Secondary School of Industry and Art in Bechyně, South Bohemia, he developed a liking for ceramic materials and their processing. That is why he went on to study in the Studio of Ceramics and Porcelain, headed by Maxim Velčovský, at the Prague Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, from which he graduated in 2014.

The exhibition presented Adam’s experiments carried out during his doctoral study at the Prague Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (Studio of Ceramics and Porcelain). These experiments resulted in the creation of ceramic objects with which Adam Železný demonstrated the effects of an explosion, or, more precisely, of the pressure caused by a quick transformation of energy, on plastic ceramic dough. The artist hereby pointed out the potential of using this unconventional technique to shape ceramic material.