Zero Tolerenc - Aleš Gallery in South Bohemia by Julius Reichel 23.2.2025 - 11.5.2025Curator: Jiří Ptáček

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With the exhibition Zero Tolerenc, the Aleš Gallery in South Bohemia will present one of the most outstanding Czech painters of the middle generation, Julius Reichel. Coincidentally, he is an artist who hails from South Bohemia and his work is still partly produced here.

Reichel draws on mass culture and civilizational phenomena for his work. In the broadest sense of the word, he “recycles” the physical and informational matter that fills our consumer everyday life as well as our communication and imagination. In particular, his images reflect the speed and chaotic nature of the times, the intricate flows of information, the constant transformation of words into hashtags and images into memes. If we do not take pop art as a closed historical chapter or as a specific aesthetic register, then Reichel offers its current equivalent.

Like many younger visual artists, Julius Reichel (b. 1981) initially took up graffiti. However, from 2010-2016 he studied in the painting studio of Jiří David at the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Prague. He has been exhibiting regularly in galleries since the beginning of the last decade. However, he has deployed a number of objects he has created from found materials in a guerrilla manner in public space. He is represented by the Karpuchina Gallery in Prague. He works on paintings and objects alternately in Prague and in his birthplace, the South Bohemian town of Zvíkov near Velešín. He took his professional pseudonym from his great-grandfather, in whose apartment in Budějovice he used to live.

– Jiří Ptáček