Home Sweet Home
Patrik Proško (1974) is a Czech intermedial artist whose work overlaps between gallery works and realizations in public space. A graduate of the Academy of Arts andCrafts in Prague, he is a sculptor, creator of objects and installations, author of conceptual interventions in urban and natural landscapes, as well as a photographer and traveller. He intertwines these pursuits into a multidisciplinary genre that has become a key element and driving force of his visual thinking.
Among the hallmarks of Proško's artistic expression are non-invasiveness (he uses ecological paint), impermanence (he outdoor works are always removed after photographing them) and, above all, an emphasis on a provocative or disconcerting change of context coupled with an assigning significance to our experience of the mundane. Most of his projects are site specific. As an artist, he has a talent for symbolic expression through which he opens up themes like the sacralization or, conversely, the absurdity of the everyday, the relationship between the personal and the general, but also expresses himself on ecological, socio-political, and/or civilizational issues. Although this scope seems to be quite broad, it is clear that the themes of human identity and its conditionality remain the stable pillars of his content portfolio.
The project's title, Home Sweet Home, dates back to 1822, when the American playwright John Howard Payne wrote the lyrics of the eponymous song for the opera Clari, or the Maid of Milan, first performed in London the following year, which became a hit. Its popularity was accelerated by soldiers during the war of the North against the South, with the expression gradually becoming a commonly used idiom throughout the world. Its meaning is clear, expressing feelings of contentment and the happiness one experiences when returning home after a long absence. And it is with the feeling of nostalgia and love of home that it is most often associated. In other words, it underlines that home is the place where we feel the best and safest.
In Patrik Proško's conception, however, home is an ambivalent space. On one hand, it represents a background and refuge in accordance with tradition. On the other hand, it is a territory that has no clearly defined form or rules, where almost anything can happen. The entire exhibition therefore takes the symbolic form of an apartment whose immersive "windows" lead to all corners of the world, to places on several continents where the artist has made his interventions over the past ten years. The interior, in turn, is dominated by objects which live their own lives. One freely builds on the other and develops each other conceptually. In its essence, the project is contextual and intertwined. It presents Proško’s most recent realizations but allows us to follow his work in a longer time frame and thus in a more comprehensive context.The exhibition is conceived as a showcase of selected artifacts, but at the same time it takes the form of a spatial installation that allows everything to be perceived on a real experiential level. Each image or object itself also represents metaphorical information. The whole thus acquires a layered character, the reading of which is open.Although its content is concrete, it is not literal, so that the associative chains are influenced by the life experience of the viewer, who becomes an active agent in the project. The home is transformed into the world, and the world becomes the home, and the viewer becomes the one who shapes both.
Radek Wohlmuth, curator