Subtyl: Paulína Gajerová

in the house at Somolického 14 in the Old Town of Bratislava

Opening programme:
5:00 PM – doors open
5:30 PM – welcome address (Paulína Gajerová and Richard Hronský)
6:00 PM – concert: Line Gate / drone ambient (hurdy-gurdy)
7:00 PM – concert: Motvilja / experimental ambient

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Exhibition opening hours:
Sunday 10 May 2026 (2:00 PM – 6:00 PM)
Thursday 14 May 2026 (2:00 PM – 6:00 PM)
Friday 15 May 2026 (2:00 PM – 6:00 PM)
Saturday 16 May 2026 (2:00 PM – 6:00 PM)
Sunday 17 May 2026 (2:00 PM – 6:00 PM)

The exhibition can also be made accessible outside public opening hours upon request until the end of May 2026 (Richard Hronský / +421917115507 – or by replying to this email).

• Admission to the event is free of charge, with the option of making a voluntary contribution.
• Please note that entry is at your own risk. There are no toilets or running water on site; however, bottled drinking water will be provided, along with standard exhibition-opening refreshments.

Annotation

From the originally intended title “A Place of Transformation”, this reflection on the duality of the worlds of fantasy and reality seeks to imitate a subjective map of the artist’s process of searching for identity in its fullness. If, in her previous exhibition, Gajerová returned home both spiritually and physically, today the story continues with a return to the idea of an “inhospitable environment” of stagnation. The house on Somolického Street convincingly imitates such a place. “Every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of enclosed space in which we like to hide or withdraw into ourselves is a symbol of solitude for the imagination.”¹

What is fantastic in itself is the confrontation with an almost architectural work – an idea of the environment of the artist’s being. It is a walk through the lucid mist of reeds and the desire to hide within them. Through the delicacy with which she renders misty alternatives to reality, Gajerová succeeds in transforming traditional painterly motifs of reeds — hide-and-seek in the reeds — into a portal inward, from a world of disengagement, the paralysis caused by the oppressions of reality, into a world of engagement, of safe freedoms to fulfil oneself in desire born in an inhospitable environment. Just as the function of the mist in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant is to erase people’s memory, Gajerová’s landscape phenomenon of reeds transports people into the landscape behind the canvas. This hybrid landscape, its resonant depth and construction, can already be considered real within the active medium of the ruin as a place of “projection of inner worlds”.

– Richard Hronský

1 – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1957).

Paulína Gajerová

Paulína Gajerová (1999) is an artist active on the young Slovak art scene since 2019. After completing her bachelor’s degree at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, she successfully completed her master’s studies at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She continues to build on a consistent creative trajectory and lives in Slovakia.

She presents outer worlds, inner worlds, and everything in between through the lens of painting on canvas. Almost covertly, her works testify to answers to questions of identity and safety, which are threatened in the counter-reality of unfreedoms. In 2021, she was part of the AFAD collective that won the CE ZA AR award for the outdoor intervention Informal Mo(nu)ments in the public space of Petržalka. She also became one of the finalists of the VÚB Foundation’s Painting 2023 competition. She has exhibited at Amsterdam’s DOOR Open Space, in the well-known Prüger-Wallner Garden, at DKP, Moravany Manor House, as well as in now-defunct legendary venues such as T3 – Cultural Vehicle, Fuga, and Hotdock Project Space.

Subtyl

Subtyl is a format under Rozptyl, presenting episodes of subtle, temporary art exhibitions and situations in unused, abandoned, or unofficial spaces. It is a micro-format — a “laboratory of life” — that explores ephemerality and creativity in conditions where art becomes part of everyday life. In this way, Subtyl approaches the idea of “temporary autonomous zones” (Hakim Bey): free spaces beyond the reach of institutional control, where creation becomes a shared experiment.