Martin Zvěřina 15 January 2026 - 15 February 2026 Online Viewing Room
Copper Horizon Oil, wax and sand on canvas 165 x 145 cm 2025
About the artwork
Copper Horizon is part of Martin Zvěřina’s most recent series of paintings, in which the act of looking becomes as significant as the act of painting itself. Rather than describing a specific landscape, the work emerges from prolonged coexistence with the image, through repeated returns to its surface and sustained attention to how the painting changes over time. The image does not resolve into a single, legible meaning; instead, it remains an open field in which layers of paint accumulate, disrupt one another, and are continually reactivated.
The painting functions as an unstable object poised between fascination and dissolution. Colour behaves organically, at times evoking bodily structures, sediments, or vegetative forms, without ever settling into a fixed shape. This condition of perpetual “almost-recognition” produces an experience akin to pareidolia: the viewer senses that something is being perceived, yet meaning continually slips away. Copper Horizon thus oscillates between abstraction and suggestive figuration, between landscape, interior space, and a residual image that resists full naming.
In this sense, the painting may be understood as a talismanic object, not as a bearer of protection or myth in a traditional sense, but as a site where the desire for meaning encounters its constant disintegration. Echoing Symbolist and late nineteenth-century painting, the image does not function as a representation of the world, but as a field of internal projection in which material and perception are held in tension. The surface retains its own vitality, resisting both rapid consumption and definitive interpretation.
Extending Zvěřina’s long-term dialogue with landscape, poetry, and historical modes of painting, Copper Horizon conceives the canvas as a space of duration and concentration. The painting unfolds as a slow process in which meaning emerges gradually and remains unresolved, a quiet yet persistent counterpoint to contemporary acceleration, image saturation, and fragmented attention.
Martin Zvěřina (b. 1989) is a Czech visual artist whose work spans painting, installation, video, and sound. His practice focuses on the relationship between material transformation and perception, often blurring the boundaries between image, object, and landscape. Drawing on phenomenological thought and Eastern philosophy, he approaches art-making as a meditative and transformative process, in which human experience encounters the elemental properties of material and time.
His work frequently engages with the medium itself, its essence, historical connotations, and at times an ironic questioning of its own limits. He draws inspiration from a wide spectrum of sources, including literature, biological systems, and philosophy, relating them to emotions, relationships, and modes of perception in contemporary society.
After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, he developed a distinctive practice grounded in material experimentation and sensitivity to environment. He repeatedly returns to the motifs of landscape and the body, not as fixed objects, but as relational fields between colour, light, and space. From this perspective, his work resonates with late nineteenth-century painting, when attention to atmosphere, duration, and the inner experience of seeing began to move away from stable modes of representation, partly as a response to industrialisation and the rise of capitalist structures, offering a counterpoint to technological and social change. In this sense, he approaches the canvas as a site where the visible world is transformed through subjective time into something fluid, open, and mutable, as a mode of working with attention that consciously positions itself against contemporary forms of technological and economic acceleration.
Poetry and experimental literature play a significant role in his practice, particularly texts in which language functions as a tool for exploring unconscious processes and inner transformation. He finds inspiration, for example, in the circle of Le Grand Jeu or in the writings of Věra Linhartová, texts in which language operates as an act of naming that simultaneously establishes and closes meaning. Language here is not merely a vehicle of communication, but a symbolic and structuring principle of experience, akin to the way image or sound functions in his work.
Alongside his visual practice, Zvěřina also works with sound and music, which he approaches as a natural extension of his material practice. Drawing on field recordings and improvisation rooted in the traditions of the musical avant-garde, he shapes sound through processes of layering, distortion, and temporal modulation, paralleling his approach to visual media.
He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (painting studio of Vladimír Skrepl), at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno (Intermedia studio of Václav Stratil), and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Finland. He has completed numerous residencies and internships in Germany, Belgium, Austria, Finland, and the Czech Republic.
Since 2010, he has been active on both the visual art and music scenes in the Czech Republic and internationally. He has exhibited in numerous private, state, and regional institutions and has been a member of several experimental music groups.
