CGD

Experimental designer Tadeáš Podracký is an artist whose works you recognize at first sight. He develops his characteristic style in hand-carved wooden objects which develop the tradition of hand craft, but also critique it and move it forward. To get the final complex organism, he hand-works each curve for hours. If you only saw his works on photographs, it would be easy to mistake them for 3D generated images. The symmetrical shapes of his chairs, stools, armchairs and mirrors seem as if they were designed by a computer. The contrast between the seemingly virtual and material hand craft creates for a fascinating tension and makes the items less applied design and more a work of fine art. Their force comes into its own upon personal contact with the perfectly crafted material which begs questions about the illusions of virtual reality, the value of hand craft and its significance and role today. Podracký is not afraid to pour color over the fruits of his long work and often uses artificial materials which he combines with glass and metal.

He showed the breadth of his approaches last year during his solo exhibition The Bloom of Bones, which took place in Prague’s Galerie Kuzebauch. The objects thematized modern mythologies and the cult of contemporary consumer society, and he inscribed into the works Christian themes adopted from folk culture – for example the traditional motif of Morana. He carved the symbolic figure of Death into seemingly cheap polystyrene and framed this contemporary relief into a frame made of hand-carved wood. As if saying that nothing is sacred for the contemporary person, and in the same gesture critiquing the traditional methods of fine wood carving. In later works he explored the connection between humanity and nature, wondering how objects would look if they suddenly came alive. For example his Thistle stool combines anatomic and botanic features which seem to meld naturally. Their meshing is accented by the use of two different wooden materials – the light-colored birch and the eastern black walnut. Podracký also used the concept of abiogenesis – i.e. the development of life from non-organic matter – in the work Abiogenesis he made for the Designblok Cosmos exhibition. It was his first time working with organically-shaped metal combined with uranium glass.

2023 has so far been one of the most successful years for him – apart from the two events mentioned, he also presented works at the Global Tools group exhibition in the Side Gallery in Spain, which also presented his work at the world’s foremost contemporary art convention – Design Miami. Tadeáš’s art also travelled to Paris thanks to the London-based Sarah Myerscough Gallery and he exhibited at the Venice Design Biennial, at New York’s Superhouse gallery and at Melbourne’s FIN Gallery. He also made special works for the Made by Fire exhibition in Milan, Prague and Brno, and the Ashes and Sand exhibition for the Austrian Schloss Hollenegg gallery. And starting September, him and artist Romana Drdová are heading the K.O.V. studio at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague.

Eva Slunečková

Tadeáš Podracký ranks among the few Czech artists capable of sophistically balancing on the border between fine and applied arts. In his work, he generally ponders over what motivates individuals to create works of art, design or architecture, and asks about the differences between the roles played by human instincts and mere cultural expectations. The results are spectacular and, simultaneously, purely speculative forms that disrupt the stereotypes in the appearance of traditional furniture and other objects. At Designblok 2017, the designer presented two new projects at the same time: a mirror for the exhibition You Live by Your Heart, and a collection of lighting objects, My Utopia. In the first case, he interpreted the motif of a heart as both a vitally important organ and a cultural and historical phenomenon, translating it into a dynamic mirror object. He created a complex abstract solitaire piece, where the reflecting surfaces blend with the construction itself. This results in a symbolic as well as functional interior object of sharp, irregular edges and trapezoids, which become the author's peculiar morphology. The second topical project, My Utopia, focuses on the atmosphere of global metropolises which the author recently visited. Here, Podracký visually deconstructs neon signs and billboards to create barely definable objects expressing the utopian character of large urban wholes. Podracký incorporated neon lighting to organic constructions of steel and glass, thus making them the bearers of his own utopian vision.

Adam Štěch