Rainforest Space

Jan Poupě is one of the prominent representatives of contemporary Czech painting. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he studied in Jiří Sopko’s studio, and in 2014 received the Critics’ Award for Young Painting. His work focuses primarily on space, perspective, optics and geometry, while also drawing inspiration from architecture and the observation of natural and physical phenomena. His works have been presented at venues including MeetFactory, Fait Gallery and Galerie Nová síň, and are regularly featured in exhibitions abroad.

The painting is loosely inspired by the artist’s experience of moving through the dense Congolese rainforest, where he was particularly struck by monumental trees with massive buttress roots. Rather than depicting nature descriptively, however, Poupě explores its underlying structure, transforming the tree into a system based on fractal principles and an interconnected mycorrhizal network. The construction also references Gothic architecture and its verticality, lending the rainforest the character of a sacred space, a place whose mysteries transcend human understanding. Yet this homage to nature is accompanied by an awareness of its fragility and an unsettling question about its future. The geometric forms and perspectival construction may evoke the measuring and surveying of trees as valuable raw material. Although selective logging removes, on average, only a few trees per hectare, the construction of access roads and the movement of heavy machinery disrupt the surrounding ecosystem as a whole, which may take centuries to recover. Alongside a sense of awe at the monumentality of the rainforest, the painting thus poses a quiet question: whether these places, and the intricate relationships shaped within them over centuries, will be preserved for the future.

100% of the hammer price will be donated to support the Save Elephants project.