With his third solo exhibition at the Kai Erdmann Gallery, Czech artist Vladimír Houdek thematically returns to geometry and presents his new body of work for the first time in Germany. A key aspect of the series, which consists of paintings in small to medium formats, draws on Van Gogh’s sunflowers, showcasing a yellow color palette that, combined with dark horizon lines, creates a spatial background for multifaceted geometric shapes.

Geometry, with fundamental shapes such as circles, triangles, and quadrilaterals, as well as derived rhombuses, ellipses, loops, or fans, serves as a central starting point in the artist‘s work and is continuously subjected to new aspects in the medium of painting, in drawings, gouaches, films, and collages. In the process of creating the paintings, layers of color in a semi-dried state are repeatedly scraped off the edge of the canvas using a squeegee, ultimately forming a kind of corona beyond the edge of the picture. Particularly in the smaller works, this creates a strong object-like and processual character, in marked contrast to a picture object that often appears sublimely.

Additionally, drawn grids, color edges peeled off by tape markings, or perforated mementos with a compass point, emphasize a process of becoming and discarding, as well as the act of seeing itself. Optical illusions, flickers, movements, forms that are both static and throning against dark night skies, in the cosmos – in the universe. Houdek’s paintings create a silence and detachment that seeks reduction as well as expressiveness in their form. In this regard, Houdek also understands geometry as a metaphor for the universe itself, as a place of constant reflection, and as a paradox between matter and infinity, between purity and destruction.

Rosa Windt
Lübeck 2024