Jan Kaláb: Beyond the Frame

KodlContemporary is pleased to present Beyond the Frame by Jan Kalab, the artist’s first exhibition in his hometown of Prague for nearly 10 years.

Working site-specifically within the glass cube of KodlContemporary’s new gallery space in the centre of the capital, Kalab will show four new series of works alongside a colossal, fifteen-metre sculpture on the roof of the gallery itself.

Each of the bodies of work shown in Beyond the Frame push the artist’s practice beyond the fixity and flatness of both the traditional canvas as much as the walls of the exhibition space itself. 

Whilst Kalab’s effervescent Kaleidoscope works and his distended Wave series, shown on the upper floor of the gallery, expose their customarily hidden structural architecture to the viewer, the works on the ground floor of the exhibition space go beyond the frame entirely. His iridescent Suspension mobiles, which take over the front entrance of the gallery, as well as his highly gestural series of bronze and glass Sculptures – shown here for the very first time – are both visible in the round with no fixed viewing-point, providing the viewer with multiple possible perspectives.

Yet the title of the exhibition is not only literal, indicating toward the material presence of the works shown in the gallery itself, but likewise speaks metaphorically to the ongoing journey of Kalab’s practice itself. As shown since the earliest days of his work in both the studio and the public sphere, Kalab’s practice has consistently refused both the frame and the framing of the traditional artwork. Moving beyond the rigid structures of the canvas as much as of the institution, beyond the strict boundaries defining what is and isn’t art itself, Beyond the Frame thus reveals a body of work in which form and context, image and environment, the promise and the possible, are placed in constant and productive tension with one another.

Dr Rafael Schacter is Associate Professor in Anthropology and Material Culture at University College London, where he heads the Material, Visual, and Digital Culture section. His research explores public art, graffiti, monuments, global art and the material dimensions of visual culture, bringing anthropology into dialogue with contemporary artistic and curatorial practice. His work is particularly concerned with how visual and material forms occupy public space and engage with questions of citizenship, power, resistance and urban life. Schacter’s fourth book, Monumental Graffiti, was published with MIT Press in 2024. He has also published monographs with Yale University Press (2013/2023), Lund Humphries (2018), and Routledge (2014), and has curated exhibitions at the Tate Modern, Somerset House, The Brunei Gallery, amongst other national and international projects in the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, the Philippines, and beyond.