Helena Lukášová, Michal Palaščak
Viscera Domus

The exhibition Viscera Domus presents a spatial-visual dialogue between Helena Lukášová and Michal Palaščak, inspired by a specific building - the recently opened extension of the Faculty of Education at Masaryk University in Brno, Poříčí, which includes several spacious studios for art students and comfortable resting facilities for students and their teachers with views of the green surroundings. In the Jaroslav Kral Gallery, visitors enter Michal Palaščak's experimentally designed architectural labyrinth, built from basic, already used building materials. The installation provides a framework for Helena Lukášová's paintings, projected onto a holographic screen and stretched into light boxes. Her works evoke a biological structure - a painting of exposed tissue created by computer manipulation. The intention of the artists is to lead the audience through a corridor with views and vistas that offers the ultimate experience of the architectural design of the experimental installation of the works presented, and to show the house not as a utilitarian thing, but as an organism living in symbiosis with man.

The installation will also include the exterior of the building, specifically the balcony around the exhibition hall, which is accessible from the Jaroslav Král Gallery.

“One of the most famous and influential statements about architecture comes from the co-founder of modern architecture, Le Corbusier, who said that ”the house is a machine for living". To some extent, this statement sums up the modernist view of architecture, which emphasises the functionality and efficiency of living. According to this, a house should serve its inhabitants as efficiently and controllably as a machine. At the same time, the advent of purpose, clarity, optimality and economy has conjured up traditional notions of the house. There is no room left for poetry, drama, romance or mystery in architecture. The purely rational approach to thinking about architecture deprived it of the dimension that allows buildings to coexist with people.
Helena Lukášová and Michal Palaščak decided to show the audience one house in a way as if we were looking into an anatomical atlas of architecture. Their depiction resembles sketches of a skeletal system with muscles or organs. The induced insides and internal processes of the house resemble an entity that invites exploration, knowledge and understanding. Rather than a machine for living, the house is an organism ready for cohabitation, in which the house offers utility and the human being repays with meaning." Rostislav Koryčánek, curator of the exhibition.

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