Jiri Franta and David Böhm give performances, shoot videos, create spatial installations, intervene in public space, paint murals, and illustrate books and magazines. Their output is reminiscent of a daily sketchpad, graffiti, caricature, comics, conceptual art, grotesquerie, sports event, the art of teamwork, physical experiment, improvised choreography, and theatre performance. They are interested in procedure, the time-lapse principle, surmounting danger, the intermingling of media, experimentation, obeying and transcending rules, creative dialogue, irony, gravity, infinity. In other words, Jiří Franta and David Böhm do not create drawings, but draw. They have been collaborating since 2006.

Soda gallery presents solo show of the Czech artist duo David Böhm (born 1982) / Jiri Franta (born 1978) in Bratislava for the first time. The dominant characteristics of their practice – based predominantly on classical drawing technique (although their installations also employ other media) – include playful toying with meanings, the substitution of authorship, the exploration of different forms of installation and the phenomenon of the process of drawing.

The mechanism of automatic association flow and the more intuitive conception characteristic from the beginnings of their collaboration has gradually been replaced by increasingly focused (but still highly playful) productions concerned with the relationship between drawing and performance, as well as with transcending the boundary between drawing and conceptual art. They have developed this discipline beyond its ostensible borders, either by displacing and shifting our established notions of the phenomenon of drawing or through mechanical games with the medium itself. An important role is also played by the dialogue between the two artists, thanks to which they achieve results that differ from their individual productions. They often react to one another instantly and the constantly increasing level of their mutual “interconnectedness” gives rise to something that can be compared to the effect of psychological reverberation.

To the question how themes are entering into their works, they answer, that topics are never being set up front, but they are developing meanwhile the process of drawing. That doesn’t mean it is an automatic expression in their unconscious, but it can be rather compared to some explosion, which is reordering some visual sensation of the world around us. In its own way it is a metaphor of the current world, which is not possible to grasp only from one point of you.

Courtesy of SODA Gallery

http://www.sodagallery.sk