This Is No Longer the Place Where I Was by Sabina Knetlová 28.11.2025 - 11.1.2026Curator: Jiří Ptáček

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One of the fundamental principles of Sabina Knetlová’s sculptural practice is the tension she creates between the “modern” and the “archaic.” Her sculptures look as if they had emerged from forms unearthed during excavations somewhere in the ancient Near East, yet we never doubt for a moment that they are the work of an artist of our own time. The search for sources of inspiration in another cultural sphere—whether understood temporally, geographically, or as the intersection of both—has been returning to visual art with steady regularity for nearly two centuries. Each time, however, it reflects a different, historically unrepeatable “projection,” shaped by the cultural state of the period and the themes that artists of the time strive to grasp. Among the key points of today’s cultural situation are a growing awareness that the Euro-American civilizational sphere does not occupy a hierarchically superior position, doubts about many consequences of modernity, and calls to reconsider the human position (and future role) within the complex of a severely tested Gaia. One of the frequent artistic perspectives is the reflection of one’s personal situation—a personal statement that encompasses this wider consciousness.

Sabina Knetlová’s work belongs precisely to this category. In her current exhibition, she responds to a place that has transformed (and perhaps is still transforming), and she does not shy away from admitting that her heightened attention to this phenomenon was influenced by moving and beginning life in a new environment. Yet her practice does not end there. On the contrary, Knetlová’s needs include expanding her personal feeling into a poetic allegory—one capable of speaking to us in virtually any place that seems shifting, unstable, or altered from what it once was.

The experience of changes that are, by their very nature, irreversible is a significant feature of our broader civilizational mood. From this arise new uncertainties and threats, sometimes so unsettling that we struggle to calmly consider whether they might also open new possibilities. Sabina Knetlová’s sculptural compositions contain elements of both. Her anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figurative forms have hands or paws that end in menacing claws. Yet in contrast, she also presents in the exhibition a kind of bare rods on which the first buds are beginning to sprout.

Knetlová’s artistic development is not fast. In this respect, she seems to strive for a certain slowness—incidentally, a pace characteristic of the tempo of change in ancient art. Over time, she abandons certain elements and arrives at others, yet at her core she operates with a similar register of forms. To observe a more fundamental shift, one cannot look at her sculptures over merely two, three, or even four years. With this awareness, we may stand before her works and ask whether this very quality is her response to the transforming place in which and toward which she situates her sculptures. A slowing down, a calming, a lyrical poeticization—one that must never paint reality in rosy hues. One is tempted to joke that perhaps this is why her concrete remains in its default industrial grey.

Sabina Knetlová (1996, Jaroměř; lives and works in Ostrava) is a Czech sculptor of the young generation whose work connects classical sculptural principles with contemporary material thinking. She primarily works with concrete, plaster, and prefabricated elements, which she combines with organic forms and soft materials. Her work has been presented at Art Dubai (2025), Sofia Art Fair (2025, 2024), Vienna Contemporary (2024, 2022), and Contemporary Istanbul (2023), as well as at exhibitions in the Giudecca Art District (Venice), Art Depot in Innsbruck and Czech Center Brussels. She has held solo shows at The Chemistry Gallery, Karpuchina Gallery, DOT. Contemporary Art Gallery, and Saigon Gallery.

– Jiří Ptáček