Cyberlemon

In his first solo show in Prague since 2018, Hynek Martinec draws together an extraordinary range of references to meditate upon the present state of human consciousness. Martinec, who has lived in London for over seventeen years, responds in his new work to an accelerated and increasingly polarised world where art, technology, and social changes meet in unexpected and often paradoxical ways. In a time of fracturing societies marked by the rise of extremist ideologies and identity politics, and as AI is beginning to have profound effects on the cultural landscape, Martinec traces a journey from the “cradle of civilisation” in the Mediterranean – the cultures of ancient Greece and the Roman Empire – to the present day, to ask: Where are we now? How did we get here?

Often labelled hyper- or photorealist, Hynek Martinec’s paintings defy such categorisation. While his painterly technique is rooted in the realist tradition, he collapses together imagery from diverse sources, creates surreal juxtapositions, and distorts form and scale to create complex images that elude simple interpretation. In his new work, his references include ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, paintings by Rubens and Titian, the tradition of Dutch still-life painting, Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull, and Tesla’s cybertruck. Running through many of the paintings in the exhibition is the motif of the lemon, a natural product so commonplace as to be almost invisible, yet one which has nonetheless been used to represent different ideas throughout art history. For Martinec, who has painted lemons throughout his career, the lemon is a motif that introduces historic themes but is “neutral” in the context of today’s “culture war” debates.

In the heyday of Northern European painting, artists such as Pieter Claesz used the lemon not only to demonstrate their technical virtuosity (by contrasting the lemon’s rough and waxy exterior with its juicy, fleshy interior) but also as a symbol of prosperity, an exotic product available only to the affluent. Moreover, the lemon has been used by artists as a symbol of duality – embodying the contrasting nature of sweetness and bitterness.

Martinec’s lemons (along with the loaves, lobsters, and octopi that accompany them) evoke the culinary culture of the Mediterranean, an association reinforced by Martinec’s use of imagery drawn from Greek and Roman classical sculpture, much of it inspired by a visit to the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples in 2024, a visit he has called a “wake-up call”, a reminder of the enduring power of art.

The painting that gives the exhibition its title, Cyberlemon (2024), depicts a traditional still life that is morphing into a quasi-cubist array of abstract planes, inspired by the rectilinear forms of Tesla’s cybertruck. It represents a collision of the organic and the inorganic, the natural and the artificial. The hybrid Cyberlemon thus symbolises a synthesis of the old and the new and announces Martinec’s theme.

In the large new work Out of Chaos (2024–25), Martinec creates a tableau in which a tabletop still life (featuring the Northern European painterly trope of the “lemon twist”) opens onto a visual quotation from Arnold Böcklin’s iconic Isle of the Dead (1880–86, versions in the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and elsewhere). In this hybrid work and others Martinec explores the relationship between painting and drawing by leaving areas of the canvas unpainted, revealing the charcoal underdrawing, and working some drawn elements up to a high degree of finish. In DOX’s top-floor space, Martinec has further developed this recent aspect of his practice by installing large-scale site-specific wall drawings. The culmination of the exhibition is a representation of the mythic figure of Atlas, derived from a sculpture in the museum in Naples, who bears upon his shoulders not the globe but a giant lemon.

Hynek Martinec’s Cyberlemon is a surreal, playful, even absurd proposition, but is realised with serious intent. For Martinec, art remains, as it was in ancient Greece, the best and most powerful tool for making sense of the chaos around us.

Curator: Ben Tufnell

Hynek Martinec (b. 1980, Broumov, Czechoslovakia) lives and works in London. He has exhibited extensively internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at institutions such as OHSH Projects, London (2023), Parafin, London (2021, 2017, 2014), National Gallery Prague (2018), Galerie Dům, Broumov (2018), The Factory, London (2016), and the Václav Špála Gallery, Prague (2015). Important recent group exhibitions include Taste, Wonzimer Gallery, Los Angeles (2024), Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2023), Vanitas, DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague (2021), The Will To Power, ASC Gallery, London (2021), Inspiration – Iconic Works, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (2019), Inspiration – Contemporary Art & Classics, Ateneum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki (2020), and Fascination with Reality, Olomouc Museum of Modern Art (2017). Martinec’s works are held in private collections around the world and in public collections including the National Gallery Prague and the British Museum in London.