Jiří Petrbok: Patient Diary

Jiří Petrbok’s exhibition Patient Diary focuses on the theme of self-portraiture,
presenting the artist’s work from the 1990s up to the present as an unbroken record of a changing, constantly questioned “self”.

For Petrbok, the self-portrait does not serve to affirm or stabilise identity but instead becomes a space of transformation, disguise, irony, and defence. In his paintings the subject appears as a hybrid, a role, a symbol, or a body subjected to the pressures of the surrounding world. The exhibition’s title refers not only to illness but to the broader experience of a person exposed to the influence of institutions, social expectations, symbols, and their own body. Here the “patient” is one upon whom the world weighs heavily, yet also one who keeps a personal record so as not to become a mere case. Petrbok’s visual diary intertwines pain, the grotesque, humour, and anxiety, presenting identity as a process spanning decades – fragile, ambiguous, and never definitively concluded.

The exhibition traces how this principle is reflected in various periods of the artist’s work: from early paintings of physical and existential transformation to motifs of masks, protective suits, and fragmented figures to works in which family, institutions, public space, and language increasingly enter into the self-portrait. Petrbok’s work, however, does not speak of a “true self” that can be revealed once and for all. Rather, it presents identity as a fluid set of roles, defence mechanisms, gestures, and reactions, shaped by external pressures and internal experience. Patient Diary is thus not an intimate confession in the traditional sense but an urgent portrait of a person who, in the space between vulnerability and self deprecation, attempts to maintain his own coherence.

Curator: Otto M. Urban