Black Hole

Milan Cais created the sculpture Black Hole together with the diptych of the Madonna and the Pietà as a kind of prefiguration of a monumental sculpture he is currently working on. The rare steel from the Ukrainian Azovstal foundry that he has at his disposal for making the work was brought to the Czech Republic by the industrialist Stanislav Otáhal, whose company EXPONO a.s. traded with the steelworks in Mariupol. After the Russian army seized and destroyed Azovstal, Stanislav Otáhal decided to donate the last steel imported for the making of an artwork that would become a memento of Ukrainian resistance to the aggressive Russian invasion. He approached Milan Cais, who designed a large sculpture from the “last Azovstal steel”. The metre-long offcuts produced during the making of the sculpture in tests with controlled explosions then inspired Cais to work them further, and so Black Hole came about. During the tests, the centimetre-thick steel plates were perforated several times by explosive charges, which created elegant conical openings in the material. At that moment the artist was fascinated by the contrast between the aesthetic quality of the openings and the brute force that made them. He realised that a shape like that cannot be modelled or forged in plate so thick. The explosive suddenly becomes a co-author.

In astronomical terms a black hole is a body in space where matter, light and information disappear. So the situation can also be read as meaning that the notional event horizon has already been crossed.