Hard to cut a garden in half 2

Medium Gallery

• Artists: Kristína Navrátil, Jakub Navrátil
• Curator: Marianna Brinzová
• Opening: Tuesday, 1 September 2026, 18:00
• Duration: 2 September – 27 September 2026

Annotation

The exhibition Hard to Cut a Garden in Half 2 presents the work of Kristína Navrátil (1991) and Jakub Navrátil (1987), who are connected not only by their shared interest in the medium of painting and their generational kinship, but also by a shared space and a personal relationship. The installation at the Medium Gallery includes paintings, “painting-objects,” objects, and a collaboratively created environment that references the garden as a natural yet man-made and cultivated artificial space, one that can be perceived through multiple layers and perspectives.

For Kristína Navrátil and Jakub Navrátil, the garden is not the subject of “realistic” observation. It is a space of creation and a shared place where daily care and artistic work intertwine. The garden, as a section of landscape in the form of a defined parcel, is a process. It is a space shaped by our activity, which in turn shapes us. It functions as a reality experienced through daily activities that embody ideas into concrete situations, materials, and forms. What matters here are acts of care, cultivation, patience, repetition, and sensitization, perceived as creative forces. The exhibition Hard to Cut a Garden in Half 2 presents two artistic statements that emerge from the same environment, yet each follows its own path. The shared space thus does not lead to an identical view of the world. Rather, it becomes a place of differing perspectives that challenge, enrich, and complement one another.

In her colorful, narrative, and at times even surreal paintings, Kristína Navrátil (formerly Bukovčáková) explores themes of climate grief and the environmental crisis. In a figurative sense, she depicts the state of our current local and global environment through anthropomorphic plant motifs. Her chosen area of exploration is the microclimate of the garden, with its diverse inhabitants and characters, who may seem familiar and endearing to us, but can also be unsettling and scary. Jakub Navrátil searches for meanings, mental images, and traces of past experiences that lie on the border of memory and cannot be clearly defined. He is more restrained in the color palette and themes of his paintings, which tend to be minimalist and turn inward, exploring individual starting points, structures, and cross-sections. The work of both artists is linked by a shared technological and conceptual repertoire. They work with painting in layers and cross-sections. Kristína Navrátil adopts a softer, more organic, poetic, and concrete approach, while Jakub Navrátil takes a more technical and sharp approach, aimed at deconstructing the pictorial plane and breaking it both inward and outward.

The exhibition Hard to Cut a Garden in Half 2 both unites and divides Kristína Navrátil and Jakub Navrátil’s distinct approaches to contemporary painting. Their garden is shared—both physically and mentally. It becomes a field of activity that cannot be so easily split in two. Or can it?

This project was financially supported by the Bratislava Self-Governing Region.