Silent places
3. 2. 2023 - 11. 3. 2023
In his paintings, Petr Gruber updates the current relationship to landscape and space. As an exceptionally well-equipped colorist, he sees the places he visits in their essential purity and reduced form composition. He subtracts from the picture their mundane, banal dimension, the touristic and consumerist aura, looks away from the superfluous in order to support the unique atmosphere of a specific genius loci with a painterly expression. These locations tend to be mountain huts, sheds, slopes, campsites, sharply winding roads, forest interiors, quiet shores of lakes and rivers, but also interiors of recreational facilities, from which radiates an atmosphere of habitation, time spent as a community or as a partner, human memory and specific memories. Sometimes a certain constellation of notorious objects or the equipment of recreational objects provokes the author to record certain civil moods, which nostalgically return us back in time to childhood and adolescence, to a time that has already passed irretrievably. The color and shape reduction of natural scenery with specific visual dominant elements (objects, trees, lamps, paths, lighting ramps, etc.) create captivating pictorial constellations, whose sense of contemplation and contemplation is prescribed in the title of the exhibition Silent Places.
The exhibition will be accompanied by the release of the first independent catalog of the young painter Petr Gruber produced by The Chemistry Gallery. Petr Gruber (*1989, Havlíčkův Brod) studied at the Secondary School of Graphic Arts in Jihlava between 2004 and 2008, and in 2014 he finished his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (Prof. Zdeněk Beran and Prof. Jiří Sopko). As part of his studies at AVU, he completed an internship in the Studio of Graphics II. of prof. Vladimir Kokolii (2012). In 2013, he studied at AdBK München in the painting studio of prof. Günther Förg. In 2010 and 2014, he participated in the Symposium On the Border/ Grenznah (Bavarian Forest). In 2014, he was nominated for the German award of the Leinemann Stiftung (Berlin). An interview with the author about his painting work was published in Revolver revue (No. 106/2017). In 2018, he participated in a residency in Schwandorf, Bavaria (Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus). In 2021, he completed an artistic residency in Krems, Austria (Krems an der Donau, Kunstmeile Krems). He has been exhibiting regularly since 2011.
