The married couple Magdaléna and Jakub Roztočil will present their separate works together in a joint exhibition featuring figurative sculptures of amorphous shapes and mechanically generated, rhythmically driven paintings.

Many of us often ask how difficult it is to be who we truly want to be. Nothing is automatic; essentially nothing is free. Life, in simplified terms, is about finding your own position—and then defending it. You stand in a chaotic ring called the world, wearing in layers all the roles you must occupy: mother, son, cook, lover, driver, caregiver—and somewhere between them an artist. You stand in the middle—perhaps a little more in the middle than others. What is expected of you? A new perspective on the world? On reality? A different way of seeing? Yes—and much more. Especially if you are artists who are married. Why? Simply because this has happened before, countless times, and everyone knows that history. It doesn’t matter how much those iconic stories live their own lives. Audiences want stories, and history should ideally be told as a story—but true genesis is determined only by real results.

Magdaléna and Jakub Roztočil live those real results. They continuously materialize them through sustained careers, patiently built in a discipline that has not always been in the foreground. They are two sculptors who operate at opposite poles of the expressive spectrum. Magdaléna draws on traditional forms. She models compositions based on the human figure—primarily the head and the body—working with references and citations to the organic nature of human matter: corporeality and deliberately variable proportions. She treats color with seriousness, understanding its full potential—rituality, the capacity to develop, or conversely to conclude a prefigured intention through material.

Jakub Roztočil is, as he himself says, a sculptor who, through his own “sculpture,” paints (generates) images. Using a kind of extended authorial sculptural-robotic brush, he creates abstract compositions of layered, bleeding colors in a thin water layer on precisely adjusted, horizontally mounted canvases. He works with—and primarily investigates—the possibilities of both technique and material. The result is a quiet confrontation between concrete sculptural works with broad narrative potential and a quiet, even contemplative, stance in the planes. Image and sound. Mass and surface. Mother and father. Will, perseverance, devotion—to everything: to oneself, to one’s immediate surroundings, to family, and ultimately to the whole overarching story.