PD Petr Dub

Petr Dub’s exhibition House Signs is the second one from the cycle Bridge: Prague – Brno. This project supports Brno gallery konText and Prague gallery Nika and it is based on the exchange of artists who have exhibited in either one of those galleries. The basic contentual axis of the project is the relationship between Brno and Prague/ Prague and Brno, the two main metropoles of the Czech Republic, and between Czechia and Moravia. In 2016, the konText gallery will present eight exhibitions of artists who have in the past exhibited at Nika, while Nika, a small gallery under VŠUP, will hold four exhibitions according to the same key. Petr Dub creates with his installation an imaginary link between both cities through the theme of „architectural heritage“, particularly of functionalism and international style. The selected tenement house in Brno’s Kotlářská street is a model example of insensitive, and in its final outcome damaging, interventions to historical buildings which are in the present being heat-insulated by a thick layer of insulation, while at the same time being “decorated” by a garish palette of “happy colors”. Similar approach (unfortunately) connects centers such as Prague and Brno with many other cities in the Czech Republic. Architectural sediment built upon the arbitrary use of a wide spectrum of stone paint changes our public space into a colorful palette of emotions, which, however, as a result blend into one another. Given the majority absence of municipal regulations, yellow and pistachio are slowly becoming the dominant colors of our landscape and the phenomenon of „suburban smurf homes“ thrives also in historical centers of our cities. The social framework of the resulting situation, among other things, illustrates the clash between private ownership and collective responsibility toward commonly shared space. In this project House Signs created for Nika gallery the author paraphrases this state and provides the exhibition visitors with physical confrontation with the installation on the borderland of commercial banality and a paraphrasis of the work by the American artist James Turrell. We can thus interpret Dub’s House Signs as a traditional conflict between high and low culture, something that he regularly tests in his work.