White Plastic at Pragovka Gallery / Prague

White Plastic

Petr Bureš, Kateřina Kulanová, Jan Vybíral, Vojtěch Rada

curated by Sára Davidová, Markéta Jonášová

16 September - 19 November 2020


Pragovka Gallery

Kolbenova 923/34a

190 00 Praha 9-Vysočany

Czech Republic


Photography by Marcel Rozhoň


















The white plastic material with colourful and reflective parameters R220 G 220 B 220, Fresnel IOR 2.0, and reflection glossiness 1.0 is very popular for making digital visualizations of real objects as well as for installing window casings for new plastic windows on block of flats or yards of old factories. White plastic is broadly used as its production is easy as far as input and resources are concerned – white plastic is thus pleasing to the eye and mainly to the society that is driven by the idea of economic profit based on overproduction of commodities and services. Instead of adjusting the work and production process to the specifics of the material and thein unique utilization, it is the process of production itself to which the utilization is subject. So, the uniformity of white plastic presents the ideal available to everyone, however, at the cost of a single use, environmental burdens and aesthetic banality. Presented works by the collective of four authors balance on the edge of art and architectonic practice. The goal is to reveal, transform, or comment the white plastic phenomenon.

Jan Vybíral, an architect, in his artwork MADE IN ITALY 123/4/56789101112/93 works with one of the endless series of castings of an iconic plastic chair, which has changed its form over the past thirty years due to the effects of the sun, wind, and rain. Individual parts of the chair have been taken out in order to observe the effects of aging processes: changes in the surface of the plastic are clear compared to the clean material cut. By 3D scanning, plastic fragments are put back to the natural environment of garden furniture, where they are treated as archaeological findings of future generations.

Also Petr Bureš deals with degrading objects – he examines them in his work Za plotem jáma / A Pit Behind a Fence. Petr focuses on the transformation of the industrial architecture in Vysočany factories area, mostly on the construction of a cooling tower located near Pragovka. This construction has been reconstructed in the gallery space, supplemented with photographs of surroundings and more fragile sculpture, made from castings of elements inspired by the local infrastructure and negatives of the local constructions. So, the installation preserves valuace constructing fragments of the industrial architecture, which are gradually disappearing under the influence of new developers’ projects.

Architect Kateřina Kulanová’s Vaťák / Cottoner then offers an alternative to unified procedures of the developers’ projects. Vaťák is an object balancing on the edge of architectonic model, product design, sculpture, and tailor’s work. It is a quality cut from a quality material, tailor-made, available, can be used on various occasions, and is able to shrink and grow over time. To Kateřina, Vaťák is an allegorical vehicle of her own position during the designing process as she becomes a discreet drive that corrects the directions of her client’s house. This work introduces an alternative

to a house from a catalogue as it is based on the possibility of shared authorship, individual needs, respecting the nature of the surrounding space, and sustainability. Just as white plastic is an ideal material for visualizing a wide range of objects, a ball is an ideal geometric body for selecting and adjusting the appearance of materials. Architect and artist Vojtěch Rada sees an analogy to this process in a current way of creating an abstracted model of the globe as a geoid covered with a photographic texture, which is filled with analogue or digital images of the Earth from a bird’s eye perspective. In his V duté Zemi je malé Slunce / There is a Small Sun in the Hollow Earth, Vojtěch presents “obsolete” models of the Earth – hollow Earth, surrounded by nine balls, Earth full of Germans, giants, small Sun, or meeting the titan Atlas, which the author confronts with the current model in order to relativize its informative value.