Michal Cimala: Shock Wave

The exhibition will offer a retrospective view of Michal Cimala's work from the last two decades, reflecting not only personal experiences.

The basic outline of the work of sculptor, painter, designer, and musician Michal Cimala embodies the conflict of phenomena across contemporary social and personal reality. The enthusiasm and intoxication from the speed of technical and technological changes, which push human consciousness into new experiential spaces and levels inviting exploration, alternate with fatigue, skepticism, and anxiety calling for a halt and reflection on what is multiplying and overtaking. The relationship to time manifests as both a formative and destructive force. What is constructive on one side, growing upward like a monument of confident progress, simultaneously casts a shadow of inner doubts. A society based on an ever-accelerating production system reproduces, in all directions, primarily the mechanisms associated with this principle. Humans and their lifestyles narcissistically reflect on perfection, performance, and production, in a constant movement aimed at escalating self-overcoming to the absurd. The sustainability of such a setup disappears into utopia, totality, or another kind of catastrophe. In this regard, art tends to be sensitively anticipatory and uncompromisingly direct. It timely issues warning signals towards a predominantly satisfied, stereotypically functioning society. It perceives latent layers of problems, and by uncovering them, contributes to their diagnosis. The anxiety of a possible collapse of currently established social systems generates a somatic dimension in Cimala's sculpture, in which the natural instinct for self-preservation is also significantly imprinted. The motif of the robotic body referring to the constitution of human corporeality in the author's work can then be perceived ambivalently – as a victory of science and a defeat of humanity.