KRIŠTOF KINTERA
MARTIN WERTHMANN
CRITICAL MASS

The exhibition Critical Mass brings together for the first time the work of Czech artist Krištof Kintera and Berlin-based artist Martin Werthmann. At the core of this encounter lies a shared critical engagement with social and existential questions – particularly the tensions between control and chaos, technology and the environment, memory and the collapse of order. Both artists create installation-based, often reactive works defined by their experimental use of unconventional materials and media. They open immersive spaces that confront viewers with the uncertainties of the present and challenge habitual modes of perception.

 

Krištof Kintera (*1973, Prague) is among the most influential figures in contemporary Czech art. His practice – encompassing sculpture, installation, and assemblage – relies on the transformation of everyday materials and found objects. Through processes of reconfiguration and recontextualization, Kintera exposes hidden meanings and relationships that respond to the realities of contemporary life with irony, humor, and poetic precision. His works often critique the contradictions of hypercapitalist systems and their ecological and social ramifications.

 

A centerpiece of the exhibition is the monumental concrete sculpture Heavy Head Boy (2024), a true-to-scale replica of the four-meter-tall figure Kintera created for the new Dvorecký Bridge spanning the Vltava River in Prague, scheduled to open in 2026. The sculpture depicts a seated boy with an oversized head – evoking, at first glance, Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker (1902). Yet, whereas Rodin’s figure appears poised in contemplative concentration, Kintera’s boy seems weighed down by the very act of thought itself. Heavy Head Boy addresses the mental burden and ethical responsibility of contemporary existence. The exaggerated head serves as a metaphor for the overextension of thought and responsibility in an era of overwhelming complexity. The raw concrete surface recalls the aesthetics of Brutalism, while the geometric form language references Rondocubism – a uniquely Czech variation of Cubism that emerged after World War I and briefly became a national style in the newly founded Czechoslovakia.

 

Also featured in the exhibition are Kintera’s characteristic 3D Drawings. These relief-like compositions are created by spontaneously assembling diverse materials – scrap parts, wires, and objets trouvés – onto plywood panels. Despite their sculptural presence, Kintera conceives of them as drawings, emphasizing the immediacy, gesture, and dynamism of their creation. The resulting works address social and ecological issues with Kintera’s signature dark humor and sharp analytical insight.

 

A distinctive subgroup within these works are the Electric Flowers. Using a Lichtenberg generator, Kintera channels electrical currents through paper or other materials, producing delicate branching patterns that appear simultaneously natural and artificial. These electrically “grown” plant forms embody a paradoxical energy – both creative and destructive. They exemplify Kintera’s poetic exploration of the fusion between nature and technology and his sustained engagement with the themes of transformation, decay, and generative force.

 

Through his large-scale woodcuts, Martin Werthmann (*1982, Gießen) constructs immersive pictorial environments where beauty and violence, order and chaos, figuration and abstraction intertwine. His works possess an overwhelming, almost gravitational aesthetic that draws viewers into layered fields of color and light. By superimposing translucent pigments and diaphanous textures, Werthmann dissolves the boundaries between surface and depth, motif and materiality, transforming the image plane into a space of transcendence.

 

The artist’s motifs often derive from press photographs documenting human-made catastrophes – explosions, wars, and disasters in cities such as Aleppo, Beirut, and Tianjin. Werthmann transforms these images through a complex, multilayered printing process that fuses them with natural patterns. In the final works, only fragments and traces remain, evoking not the site of destruction itself but rather a spatialized memory of the event. Werthmann’s art does not seek to reproduce catastrophe mimetically; instead, it creates spaces for emotional and sensory reflection. The image becomes a resonant field that mediates between the pictorial space and the viewer’s experience. In his most recent body of work, Werthmann expands this concept of the “fractured space”: oscillating between figuration and dissolution, the works unfold across multiple layers of depth, probing new relationships between perception, memory, and reality. They mirror a world in which established certainties – personal, political, and social – are eroding, leaving individuals in search of new forms of orientation and identity.

 

Both Kintera and Werthmann take the ambivalence of contemporary threat as the point of departure for their artistic inquiry. Werthmann employs images of catastrophe to examine the aesthetic and moral dimensions of human experience, while Kintera uses irony, technological transformation, and material exaggeration to reveal the paradoxes of modern life. What unites them is an exploration of thresholds – between beauty and destruction, control and collapse, empathy and detachment. Their works demand contemplation of the fragile equilibrium between understanding and overload, opening spaces in which the complex relationship between humanity, technology, and the environment can be reimagined.