Radek Mužík: Ripening

“I work as long as my sculpture demands. And sculptures are like fruit – there is some fruit that matures faster than others.”

 Charles Despiau

A fixed point in a space that continually transforms itself, a record of a moment, a celebration of material and physical labour. In the traditional conception, sculptures are a constant; a timeless object in a changing urban or natural context. Many pieces by Radek Mužík, however, operate different.

Mužík works with traditional materials, from plaster, stone, wood, and metal to less traditional ones including felt and prefabricated metal parts. In treating this material, he relies both on the classical methods of sculptures and on craft techniques typical of his native region, Valašsko. In the commentary accompanying his diploma work, he stated: “While I agree that art is not a question of craft, it is craft that gives me a satisfaction in the work I undertake.” In his practice, craft is turned into a process of slowly transforming the creative idea into a specific physical object; a temporal record. This record, however, need not be final. The artist does not hesitate to change and deconstruct it over time.

The result is a broad spectrum of forms of expression, from traditional sculptural subjects such as portraits and figures to abstract objects in which Mužík develops a dialogue between materials and forms, hard and soft, blunt and sharp, natural and industrial. He makes frequent reference to fundamental architectural and tectonic principles, sometimes quoting historical styles. These are clearest in the objects he calls “hraničníky”, or “border-markers” – points in the landscape that define a particular space. His figures and busts, on the other hand, contain a strange duality between the specific and the general; the historical and the thoroughly contemporary. You can catch echoes of classical sculpture reaching back deep into history, as well as the very concrete physical and emotional form of the individuals portrayed. Within the artist’s approach, figures, portraits, and free composition are equivalent, without having to be divided into genres. The contrast between the timeless and the momentary is thus present across his oeuvre.

Alberto Giacometti stated that a sculpture is not an object, but “questioning, a question, an answer”. Radek Mužík’s artworks are also not objects, but rather physical records of the search for answers to fundamental sculptural questions about the relationship between matter and space. While they can be timeless and constant, they are, in principle, the fruits of continual labour, at various stages in their ripening, and thus involved in a process of constant transformation and development.