At Kostka Gallery, Jozef Mrva Jr. presents new and earlier paintings within a spatial installation developed in collaboration with Ondřej Doskočil. The title fuses the name of the mathcore band The Dillinger Escape Plan with a reference to the tragic crash of the American Space Shuttle Challenger on 28 January 1986 – exactly forty years ago – an event that became a globally shared image, circulated and scrutinised down to the smallest detail.

Mrva Jr. describes his painterly method as collage-based: the works often begin in graphic software and are only later translated into paint. Central to his approach is the collision of two kinds of visuality: on one plane he places technical imagery – diagrams, blueprints, or vector based mathematical models – while alongside it he layers bitmap photographic material set into fields of colour. This bitmap layer functions as a fragmentary internet zeitgeist of the present social reality, composed of obsolete memes, pop-cultural references, and generic Pinterest stock imagery, which nonetheless demands a considerable effort from the viewer to decode the stacked references and their meanings.

Diagrams resembling neural networks, or sectional models – such as cutaways of car engines and their visualisations – appear as signs of complexity and as a reminder that beneath the internet’s smooth interface lies a robust and intricate infrastructure. While the surface of the bitmap images evokes the tabloid-like circulation of pop-cultural and political events, the technical layers prompt a slower, more focused mode of perception, one that we must analyse almost subconsciously. A tension emerges between what we can grasp immediately and what slips away – between the image as meme and the image as a schema of control.
The installation at Kostka extends this principle into space. Mrva Jr. uses three suspended structures to hang the paintings, their shapes derived from flowcharts – decision-making diagrams. Here, they also operate as a visual metaphor for how we sort information today: how meanings branch, switch, stall, and return in loops. Within this framework, the paintings can be read as nodes that are not firmly anchored but temporarily plugged into a broader system – much like content in endless feeds that algorithmically compete for the remnants of our attention.

In this sense, Jozef Mrva Jr.’s work can be understood as a zeitgeist rendered with painterly precision. Challenger Escape Plan is therefore not only a title with an ironic undertone, but also a subversive emblem of the digital spectacle: frozen excerpts of situations in which unexpected events cause the aura that usually surrounds them to fall away.

Jozef Mrva Jr. (b. 1988) is a Prague-based artist, curator and educator, and a graduate of the doctoral programme at FaVU BUT in Brno. In his work he combines mathematical models, found imagery and speculative philosophy with digital media (especially 3D animation and video), drawing and installation. In his paintings he repeatedly works with the motif of the knot and cyclical structures as both a visual and conceptual method. His installations incorporate collage techniques using recycled materials, as well as objects and videos often built on metaphors of the entanglement of communication networks, logistics and capitalism. He also repeatedly returns to the hidden infrastructures of the platform economy and their environmental and geopolitical consequences. His work has been shown, among others, at A Promise of Kneropy, Kvalitář, AMU Gallery (with Filip Kolychev), Galerie Kurzor, the Brno House of Arts, Boccanera Gallery, and at Biennale Warszawa.