Jan Kostohryz

The work of Czech artist Jan Kostohryz (1993) intertwines contemporary figuration with the civil poetry of everyday life and a subtle sense of grotesque. In his practice, insects play a central yet often barely noticeable role – a fly in a cup, a spider in the bathroom, or fruit flies in the kitchen. These minute motifs, which often reveal themselves to the viewer only through the title of the work, fundamentally shift the way the image is read. Kostohryz uses these micro-encounters as catalysts for tension between a person and their personal space, between the intimacy of a scene and its delicate disruption, between fascination and unease.

In his figurative plaster reliefs, the artist “preserves” fleeting moments in the form of static casts, while his paintings, with painterly exaggeration, capture potential scenarios of confrontation between humans and the most overlooked members of the animal kingdom. His use of a civil visual language and the familiarity of everyday situations forms an archetype of the young person – a representative of the millennial generation, characterized by the search for balance between work and personal life, as well as the paralysis induced by an excess of possibilities. Kostohryz’s works thus offer a sensitive, sincere, and at times ironic insight into how the young generation experiences contemporaneity.

Jan Kostohryz is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he studied painting, figurative sculpture, and printmaking. In 2018, he received the Kunstpreis der Leinemann-Stiftung for his diploma thesis. His works have been presented in solo and group exhibitions in the Czech Republic and abroad, including at the House of the Lords of Kunštát in Brno and the Czech Centre in Berlin.