ARTIST STATEMENT

• Sum up the main character of your work, your long-term interests, and themes.

• Describe the context of your work – what are your inspirational sources and theoretical starting points, which artists and tendencies do you consider as referential to your work.

• What is your work process like? Do you deal with preparation and research? How do you search for your themes? How do you choose the media you work in?

I am interested in the passing of time and the transformation of space. How they manifest themselves, how they can be captured and what traces they leave. I work slowly, in several branches, in different cycles that change, slowly develop, surprisingly connect and build on each other. I often work with the "here and now". Sometimes this "here and now" is a performative drawing or performance focused on space. At other times it can be a permanent and still sculpture, where the processuality is hardly noticeable, yet usually clear at the beginning.

I often work with a human scale, one that the recipient, viewer, visitor, listener can relate to. This means that sometimes I fill the whole available space with a performance or drawing, if it were bigger I would fill it too. Other times I fix all my attention to a single spot. Often, the measure of time and space is a human body, my living and acting one or the recorded and depicted one.

I am interested in small, tiny, immediate transformations that we can observe, listen to or participate in. Dripping water or an ant carrying a fly up a wall - just imagine the volumes. And I am equally fascinated by the collision of black holes or the landing of a satellite on a comet. That's absolutely unbelievable and hard to imagine - sending a tiny object in some direction at some speed to land on a comet at some point in the future that we have calculated in the past that it might be in the right place to meet in the universe.

Poetic episodes like this are more background, a possible starting point, not a direct source of inspiration that I would cite. But sometimes I do quote or illustrate.
I usually avoid current waves and trends, but I don't usually reject them. Rather, I move in a parallel environment.

Besides transformation, the materiality of what I work with is also relevant to me. The touch, the contact with the material is important to me. Working with the material also influences the final form, I like to work alone and learn through the process - even though this way of working is sometimes terribly slow, especially with "classical" sculpture. I've also been „working“ during my recent performances - working with great performative objects of everyday sculptural use: carpentry and welding clamps and ratchet straps. They're great, colorful, movable, technical, simple, and they hold up. They connect objects, form structures, stretch and divide space.

One branch of my work is slowly developing in the studio - without a need to relate to a specific situation. These are often body-related sculptures and drawings, figurative compositions. regularly I create small models, which I then translate into other materials: paper, cast iron, wood… Another branch are projects that develop over longer periods of time depending on the occasion and build on each other (drawing performances and installations, site-specific installations) or depending on the location (listening sculptures). And the next branch are projects initiated by a situation - an invitation to an exhibition, a particular place, and so on. Depending on the context, I can work with Cage-like generated chance processes and lists, as well as with a block-of-flats perspective in the case beam drawings in the ground.

• What is your vision for the future? How do you want to develop your work and continue your previous projects/realizations? What is your long-term goal/dream?

The important thing for me now (the last couple of years) is to find a more regular rhythm in going back and forth between Vienna, Chudobin and Wroclaw, to find a reasonable way of dividing the work according to the possibilities of each place (shared studio, own studio, Academy facilities). But more important now is to be a witness of our child gaining experience and to find a way to bend all my activities around that while being still present. Apart from that, I'm grateful that opportunities come to me and that I remain open to the possibilities that arise. However, even openness and readiness is an active and exhausting state that needs a practice.
I look forward to preparing post-pandemic fragile reliefs and reliefs frozen in walls, casting cast iron sculptures, and working on new listening sculptures in upcomming year. I would like to begin other projects that will unfold over longer periods of time, over years and decades. And also I would like to find ways how to work with volcanoes, comets, tides, glaciers, tectonic plates and erosion. Imagine the dimension of time.

BIOGRAPHY

Matěj Frank is a visual artist often being on the road between Vienna (AT), Chudobín (CZ) and Wrocław (PL). He is interested in slow transformations and transience. He explores space through sculptures and sound installations and captures time through processual drawings and durational performances. Frank's measure of time and space is often a human body, both his own, living body, as well as a depicted one. An important role in his practice plays a chance, his works are often based on a free scenario with a more or less predictable result. He seeks the relationships between fullness and emptiness, transience and permanence, he is interested in intersections and layering, while trying to maintain the simplicity of form and / or process.

As a member of the Bludný kámen association, Frank is a curator and organizer of contemporary art exhibitions. Since 2016 he has been an assistant at the Department of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Wrocław. He regularly participates in international projects and exhibitions, his work has been awarded in international competitions, he has received scholarships from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the Czech Ministry of Culture.

He believes in human responsibility and mutual respect.