As a medium, sculpture has always grappled with the fundamental principles of forming and shaping matter. But only when matter is brought to life by the consciousness and the soul of its maker does it move beyond mere shaping and become art. As Francis of Assisi once put it: whoever works with their hands and their head is a craftsman; whoever works with their hands, their head and their heart is an artist.
At the heart of this festival is the idea that our collective consciousness serves as a vast source of inspiration. The way we engage with the world, the way we process information, emotions and thoughts, then finds expression in the work of the sculptors — twenty-one of them this year. “The Consciousness of Matter” encourages us to reach into that shared space and to look for inspiration in the depths of human thought and of today's global consciousness. A consciousness that is thickened by cultural difference, by fears and by interests of power. Tomáš Dolejš takes up that theme in his sculpture Divided Society. The only woman sculptor exhibiting in České Budějovice this year, Jana Schlosserová, is showing the sculpture Displacement, leaving a concrete cast of a tree stump behind in the city.
That may be what our nature will look like if we step back from the much-discussed “green deal”. The consciousness of Budějovice will be worked on — and the imprints of the city's inhabitants captured — by the French artist Fred Martin, who will spend a month here making two installations at Rabenstejnská. The second will be a monumental face, a consciousness captured in the branches of trees.
A sculpture that holds the immaterial in matter is the sound recorded in Budějovice by David Síla and Kryštof Vitner. Alongside the serious subjects, there will be installations in the city that can simply amuse. My own contribution this year is sculptures of living matter in the shape of the grotesque creatures Rollies, inspired by drawings by my son Tim.
Enjoy the summer in the city with sculptures that become a living canvas of the mind, a space where the immaterial and the material coexist in one whole, with a message that is more or less serious.
Michal Trpák
Sculptor and founder of the Art in the City festival
