A Big Plug

Pavel Havrda (*1984, Hradec Králové) studied in Ústí nad Labem first at Štěpánka Šimlová’s studio of digital media and then at Pavel Kopřiva’s studio of interactive media. He graduated this year, the opponent of his diploma work was Zbyněk Baladrán. He works with different media – photography, drawing, sculpture, music records and at first sight his work can appear incoherent and sketchy as if it wasn’t the same artist. But later we realize that most of his work, despite being created by different media, is related, because it is found objects, situations and records with which the artist further works. Among his oldest work is a set of photographs documenting snatches of an ordinary life, a mixture of “accidental” shots with minor absurdities. Later he exhibited a set (diaprojection) of photographs of different objects found in an old farmhouse in Habřín. Drawings of Pavel Havrda are inspired by old illustrations from scientific books. Music records are inspired by instruments created from old found things – junk such as screws, springs etc. Recent work is based on work with a single object. In his diploma work it was a discarded gable at his friend’s cottage. At the present exhibition in Jelení gallery it is on the contrary “a Big Plug”: “When I found a part of a gable, discarded after a cottage reconstruction, I didn’t know that on it’s base there will be created a set of instructions, maps, scores, graphs, plans, models, scripts …, which illustrate principles, ways of thinking, processes, situations… and according which can other situations, objects, processes … be created. It didn’t take long and I found another object at which I assume a similar potential…” Everything is presented on the margin of seriousness, scientism, banality and … irony.

Exhibition of Pavel Havrda was created in co-operation with Radek Jandera, who helps us with a search for interesting students and graduates of Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, Faculty of Art and Design.

Gabriela Kotiková