David Krňanský — David Krňanský

David Krňanský’s solo exhibition, prepared especially for Warsaw Gallery Weekend, is a culmination of the series titled 10 Summer Afterimages. The series was presented, through the summer of 2017, as part of events marking the ten-year anniversary of the gallery’s founding and the opening of a new chapter in its history. This intriguing project has brought together two works at a time by two artists affiliated with LETO, focusing on the similarities and ties between their works. In the case of David Krňanský, who happens to be the youngest artist represented by LETO, this double vision has been enacted in an adverse fashion. David Krňanský’s exhibition, titled David Krňanský, posits the ironic suggestion that the most significant theme in the show is the artist himself.
David Krňanský (born 1987) lives and works in Prague. He’s a member of the Black Hole Generation, known for adopting the tools of visual culture, ready-mades, and copies to formulate a critical commentary on the state of the world. Although he works with various media, his primary artistic form is abstract painting. David Krňanský’s abstract works are characterized by a joyful and courageous exploration of color, and yet are simultaneously delimited by geometric boundaries. Geometry and the utopian ideas of Modernism are his main sources of inspiration, but only by way of undergoing a mangling process of manipulation. The natural imprecision of the hand when tested by the rigors of outlining geometric forms becomes his signature, an adventure in drawing the line and creating forms that are never ideal nor identical. The refreshing novelty and humorous nuances in his work are combined with a naïve bravura and an obstinacy for creating abstractions that hold critical and progressive threads beneath a surface layer of aesthetic pleasure.