it's giving real

it’s giving real brings together Sarah Bechter, Václav Boštík, Arvida Byström, Hugo Canoilas, Natacha Donzé, Jan Kostohryz, Tadeáš Podracký, Gabriela Těthalová and Kristian Touborg around the changing relationship between images and reality. Rather than asking whether an image is simply true or false, the exhibition considers the structures through which images become legible: how we recognise bodies, objects and environments, and how cultural assumptions shape what we believe ourselves to be seeing.

The exhibition begins from an instability that extends beyond the contemporary circulation of digital images. Václav Boštík’s paintings place this uncertainty within a longer history. His luminous fields resist immediate recognition and approach painting as a space in which orientation is continuously constructed and withdrawn. Seen alongside a younger generation of artists, his work suggests that crises of representation do not necessarily emerge through visual excess; they can equally take the form of absence, reduction and silence.

The body becomes similarly unstable throughout the exhibition. In Sarah Bechter’s paintings, figures emerge through gestures, decorative structures and fragments of familiar imagery without settling into a fixed hierarchy. Arvida Byström turns the visual language of intimacy and commercial photography back upon itself, exposing the conventions through which femininity and desire are prepared for circulation. Kristian Touborg’s fragmented figures remain bodily while resisting the stability of portraiture or individual identity.

Other works shift attention from the human figure toward the structures surrounding it. Natacha Donzé’s luminous paintings resemble screens or portals that promise depth while refusing access. Jan Kostohryz reworks the monumental language of public sculpture through scenes of domestic suspension and inactivity, while Gabriela Těthalová draws on visual structures whose historical associations continue to persist within the present. Tadeáš Podracký’s sculptural objects occupy an uncertain position between organism, architecture and tool.

In Hugo Canoilas’s The Edge of Sleep, a monumental black poodle resists easy conversion into metaphor. The animal appears as a presence rather than a symbol, unsettling the familiar hierarchy between human subject and non-human environment.

Across these different positions, it’s giving real approaches the image as a site where reality is not simply represented but actively organised. What becomes unstable is therefore not only the truth of the image, but the categories through which the visible world is divided, named and understood.