HYB4 Galerie: Vladimír Houdek: The Third Landscape | Opening

HYB4 Galerie of Kampus Hybernská warmly invites you to the opening of Vladimír Houdek: The Third Landscape on Thursday, 11 September.

The new exhibition project by one of the leading figures of contemporary Czech painting emerges from a long-standing dialogue with art history and the Romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. The exhibition presents a series of paintings in which the landscape becomes a space of inner experience, memory, and humanity's shifting relationship with the surrounding world.

For Houdek, painting is a living process of exploration. Each canvas opens up a new perspective while building upon those that came before it, together forming an open whole—a space where history intertwines with the present and the image becomes a site of quiet contemplation.

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Curator: Filip Kazda

The exhibition is taking place from 12. 9. 2026 to 24. 10. 2026. C.0 HYB4 Galerie is open from Monday to Saturday 10a.m.-8p.m.

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Vladimír Houdek belongs to a generation of artists who have long engaged with the legacy of modernism through painting. His work fearlessly confronts classical painterly principles with contemporary visual thinking, seeking new pictorial possibilities. What was initially perceived as an experimental approach has since become one of the defining voices of contemporary Czech painting, inspiring a younger generation of artists.

For Houdek, the act of painting is inseparable from a conscious engagement with art history. Historical works do not constitute a closed body of meanings but rather a living field that remains open to new interpretations. It is precisely this openness that forms the point of departure for his own painterly practice.

The inaugural work of the exhibited series is Caspar David Friedrich's The Chasseur in the Forest (1814). The solitary figure set within a monumental landscape is no longer a symbol of Romantic solitude but an image of human existence. The landscape absorbs the individual into its own order and chaos, reminding us that human presence is always only one layer within a far more expansive whole.

The position of the human figure—like that of the painter—appears unchanged. Yet each encounter with the image opens up a new experience, a new perspective, and a new way of thinking about painting. Colour does not merely construct an environment; it becomes a bearer of emotion, time, and inner states. It accompanies both the figure and the viewer at the moment when the painting itself becomes a site of transformation.

Every significant painting also opens the possibility of another. The individual canvases cannot therefore be understood as self-contained works, but rather as parts of an uninterrupted process in which each new painting continues the one before it. Gradually, the series unfolds into a single image—one that is rooted not only within the gallery space but also in our collective memory.

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‍Media partner: ArtMap, Kudyznudy.cz