HYB4 Galerie: Martin Zetová: We Are All the Same Age

We Are All the Same Age expands this perspective from the human story to the living and the non-living alike. It turns towards fundamental questions: where do we come from, and where are we going? The artist considers the possibility that if universe originated in a single moment, then everything that emerged from it shares the same point of origin. Across the vast scale of time, this common memory continues. The exhibition invites us to imagine that the living and the non-living may, in this sense, share the same age.

Zetová transforms these reflections into a spatial painting created specifically for HYB4 Gallery. An intricate system of organic genealogies unfolds across the space, different from a traditional human family tree. A few centimetres of lines may stand for millions of years on an imagined map of existence: from a source we can contemplate but cannot describe with certainty, towards a line of matter and energy whose end remains beyond our sight.

The installation is accompanied by the artist’s reflections, drawings, and sculptural reliefs made from natural materials, recalling both his sculptural practice and his economy of form while opening onto multiple layers of meaning. A sound component and a visual record of a living being introduce, for me as a curator, the fragility and transience of physical life, while the rest of the installation opens onto dimensions of time and existence that extend far beyond our own experience.

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Curator: Michal Štochl

The opening will take place on 6. 11. 2026 from 6p.m. in C.0 HYB4 Galerie.

C.0 HYB4 Galerie is open from Monday to Saturday 10a.m.-8p.m. Entrance to the gallery is through Kavárna Kampus.

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“What if we are all the same age?” Martin Zetová (*1959) asked me during our first meeting about the exhibition at HYB4 Galerie in 2025, when the project was still at an early stage. I did not know the answer then, and I am not sure I know it today. Yet I immediately sensed where Martin was heading. His question felt like a welcome awakening and prompted a deeply personal reflection. From the beginning, I was curious to see what he would bring into the white space of the gallery in Hybernská, and I felt that its clean, restrained environment would suit his artistic language.

As a curator, I do not come from an artistic background or have a traditional art-school education. I therefore sometimes form my own ideas about artists’ work, which may not fully correspond to the reality of the work itself. For a long time, I associated Zetová’s practice with a kind of conceptual minimalism expressed through many forms. This impression was partly shaped by Jitka Hanzlová, who introduced us in 2019, and grew stronger when I visited Martin’s studio. I was particularly drawn to his earlier works in metal and stone. Carrying the patina of time, they seem almost to exist independently of the hand that made them, as if telling stories spanning centuries or millennia. Some appear almost extraterrestrial: stones travelling through space, fallen to Earth with no possibility of return.

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Martin Zetová (1959) is a Czech sculptor, performer and multimedia artist. In his work We Are All the Same Age, he reflects on life as an unbroken thread of time connecting all its present forms. From the perspective of the beginning of life, individual differences dissolve – we are all the endpoints of the same flow of time.

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‍Media partner: ArtMap, Kudyznudy.cz

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