Dialogues on Art Reproductions:
I. Lick Your Finger, Turn the Page
Lenka Glisníková, Lukáš Hofmann, Jiří Thýn
11. 3. – 24. 5. 2026
opening: 10. 3. 2026 from 6 PM
A performance titled Mirror Stage by Lukáš Hofmann
will take place at 6:30 PM on the opening day.
curator: Hana Buddeus
Did your grandmother use to cut out printed art reproductions? They grow old in a box under the bed, yellowing, gathering dust. - The sound of paper ripping when you clumsily turn a page in an old magazine. - The smell of paper. Would you like to feel it? Please do not touch.
It had seemed that the fascination with reproduction technologies had cooled down and that, a century later, the circulation of digital photographs was simply an accelerated, intensifying continuation of earlier developments. The unimaginable perfection of artificial photographic images, indistinguishable from documentation of reality, however, once again leaves us feeling dizzy. It also compels us to reconsider how images are constructed. By virtue of the lens focusing, the image in Lukas Hofmann’s video pulsates as if it were alive (These wounds won’t seem to heal, 2026, video loop). Something stirs an uncertainty within me: am I looking at a detailed shot of skin, or is this image generated? In fact, it is a tissue sample from a laboratory pig, filmed under a Leica DMi8 microscope. Through this extended eye, I gaze at a magnified image of wounded skin that repeatedly approaches and recedes. As Lukas talks about skin as an interface, I think of a photograph by Jaromír Funke (and his students) printed in Fotografie vidí povrch (Photography Sees Surface), a publication from 1935. I open it to the relevant page and find that the accompanying text, too, offers an unexpectedly fitting parallel: “[…] in faces and hands, one can read the past from traces it left behind”. Funke’s interest in depicting surface is further reflected in the extensive descriptions that narrate in detail the technological process employed to achieve as perfect a representation of the surface of skin as possible. However, when I examine the reproduction with a magnifying glass, the image breaks down into the squares of the autotype screen.
The following reminiscence stems not from reading the novel itself, but from a piece of secondary literature exploring the theme of casts: Proust’s protagonist in In Search of Lost Time is disappointed by a visit to a medieval church, as the original fails to fulfil the expectations formed by his previous encounter with a plaster cast of the church’s portal in a Paris museum. When I look at the reproduction in a monograph on the sculptor Josef Václav Myslbek (1848–1922), specifically one capturing a detail of the pleated fabric on the cape of a statue of Cardinal Schwarzenberg, I feel like Proust’s Marcel. The photogravure reproduction of Josef Ehm’s image draws my attention to the artwork more strongly than encountering the statue in person at St. Vitus Cathedral – as if a photograph of a detail could capture something dispersed across the whole when encountered “live”. The moment at which the intensity of the copy surpasses that of the original is materialised for me in the exhibited works by Lenka Glisníková (Negative Space, 2026, plaster, photographs). Her objects are based on the empty forms of plastic packaging that serve to protect electronic devices during transport: forms destined to a single use and invisibility. It is only through repetition and a transfer to a different material regime that they acquire importance and meaning. By “wrapping” them in a photograph, Lenka adds another layer, transforming the imprint into an artefact. She thus also demonstrates that a mechanical copy is never purely mechanical: it is always shaped by specific decisions, manual interventions, the audience situation, and chance.
Ehm’s large negative of a Baroque sculpture of the hermit Juan Garin was created as a model for a photogravure reproduction on the cover of the first volume of Československé sochařství a malířství nové doby (Czech Sculpture and Painting of the Modern Era). It depicts an artificial cave carved in stone, in front of which emerges a bewildered hermit, his decrepit body on all fours, as if interrupted in the process of becoming an animal. While Ehm’s task was to miniaturise the sculpture and enable an image of it to circulate, Jiří Thýn enlarges this source image, inverts it, and, using an effect reminiscent of Rorschach blots, intertwines the past with the present (GARIN/GARIN, 2026, digital photograph, print on wallpaper). The historical trace is mirrored by a contemporary perspective, which is not merely a present copy of the old view but introduces a new experience. Consequently, I am not looking at a sculpture through a photograph – I am looking at an image of a sculpture that demands my collaboration in interpreting it. Jiří updates the late 1930s photograph in a way that offers no clear answers or rationally structured arguments. Like the other exhibiting artists, he works with tacit knowledge: intuition, corporeal memory, personal experience. Nor can I put it all into words – at times I simply place things on the table. In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin (a theorist whose name is so closely tied to the theme of art reproductions that I hesitate to even mention him, but I cannot help myself) compared the work of a film director to that of a surgeon. Just like a surgeon, an artist working in film disrupts wholeness, cutting up reality into shots and recomposing them. This distinguishes them from an artist working with traditional media, who does not operate on reality but instead approaches it magically. I am now trying, perhaps naively, to devise a similar metaphor for the position that has materialised in this exhibition. We consider art reproductions with a new and as yet unreflected experience with generated images. We return once again to reality, to art, to our own bodies. We approach them with respect, mindful of their disrupted wholeness, as well as with an awareness of their fascinating capacity for regeneration. Perhaps that is why I keep returning, in my mind’s eye, to the image of a therapist who uses her touch to uncover historically formed, embodied mechanisms.
For his performance at the exhibition opening, Lukas Hofmann chose a title referring to Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage (Mirror Stage, 10 March 2026, performance). He thus returns the question of the wholeness of the body to the moment at which the subject is established through an encounter with its own image – an image that integrates it precisely by being separate from it. Without ever really having studied Lacan, I allowed myself to be carried away by the parallels on offer. The original, then, is not a model for the copy but rather its effect: originality is created only through duplication. Just as examining art reproductions under a magnifying glass reveals that wholeness is only a temporary configuration held together by a structure that remains invisible when we gaze casually. Perhaps that is why reproductions return us to the body: they remind us that wholeness is not an initial state but rather something we must compose and assemble again and again.
Hana Buddeus
(Ian Mikyska)
The program of the Cursor Gallery is possible through kind support of Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Prague City Council, State Fund of Culture of the Czech Republic, City District Prague 7,
GESTOR – The Union for the Protection of Authorship
Partners: Art Hotel Praha
Thanks: Joinmusic
Media partners: ArtMap, jlbjlt.net
