Persona

The sculpture for Art in the City 2025 in České Budějovice is, according to the artist, inexplicable — and yet he has tried to explain it. For the past ten years he has been working with thermoplastics carrying the imprints of the faces of patients undergoing treatment for cancer, in which they are fixed so that they can be irradiated precisely. They are a fascinating material in which both human anatomy and the patient's individual character are present. The material and its dynamics fascinate the artist, and for a long time he worked on how to strip away from it the meanings tied to the hospital setting. He flattens the originally three-dimensional shapes into planes and then assembles these charged, doubly charged forms into various constellations. He took the materials and later redrew them together with David Přikryl so that they could be enlarged and laser-cut in sheet metal; in the end he reduced it all to the 6 pieces of sheet the sculpture is made of. He had a kind of travelling version of the sculpture at Art Basel in Miami in 2024, where he photographed how it should ideally be installed in a city, in interaction with buildings. That convinced him the concept was viable and he set about realising it at a larger scale. The sculpture was made in May 2025. He had been preparing it for a whole year and knew that a visit from this object would enliven České Budějovice. It is a kind of arrested, visualised shadow of a spectral mask taken from a human face, which can be a mask of life and of death at once. The dichotomy present in the object is not legible at first glance, and it is probably necessary to know this text to understand where its inspiration comes from. But even if we knew nothing at all about the sculpture, the artist believes the public will find some relationship to the object in the end. Just as they find one to everything around them: people tend to name natural phenomena around them, chance appearances, stains in puddles and the reflections of anything that resembles something. It is in our nature. He does not know what this sculpture will evoke. The sculpture is called PERSONA, Latin for mask. It was made by Witkowitz a.s. in Ostrava-Vítkovice. Thanks are therefore due not only to the workers and engineers who worked on it, but to the owners as well.