Palcát, from the series Virtues & Vices Petite

50% of the hammer price is allocated to support the non-profit foundation Spolu s odvahou, a member of the Bátor Tábor Family.

Matyáš Chochola is one of the boldest figures on the Czech art scene today. He works with a wide range of media, particularly sculpture, objects, found materials, as well as his own performances. He often uses his objects to create complex scenographic environments full of elements of shamanism, mysticism, and pop culture. Chochola studied in the painting studio of Vladimír Skrepl and Jiří Kovanda at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, and in 2016 he received the Jindřich Chalupecký Award. The sculpture Palcát (Mace) is from his series The Virtues and Vices of Our Time, which is a postmodern reaction to Matthias Bernard Braun’s famous sculpture set Virtues and Vices at the Kuks Hospital in Eastern Bohemia. The individual sculptures are created using concrete 3D printing, but they are also handworked. In terms of form, they make reference to cubism and brutalism, but they have also absorbed the aesthetic of science fiction and the rich tradition of totemically shaped stelae that appeared in Western art between the 1940s and 1960s. And lastly they are an individual interpretation of the gray area between virtue and vice. They thus reflect the ambivalent experience of contemporary human beings and deconstruct the moralistic tone of Braun’s sculptural group. The Virtues and Vices of Our Time was recently shown at the gallery EPO1 in Trutnov, and it is slated to be exhibited at Vyšehrad in Prague. The sculpture Palcát is a smaller bronze cast of a concrete sculpture of the same name, which refers to, among other things, the Hussite Wars. The bundle of vertical rods in a slightly rotated arrangement are a variation on the formal principles of Gothic cathedrals.