Gegenraum

Courtesy Galerie Martin Janda

Galerie Martin Janda presents the fifth solo exhibition by the renowned Czech painter Jan Merta from October 23 to November 28, 2026.

Jan Merta’s painting moves between figuration and abstraction. His works revolve around personal memories, reflections on his own position as an artist, as well as an attempt to orient himself and find his place in different spaces. From an almost enigmatic visual language, a tension emerges in which the boundaries between object and person, between concrete appearance and mental conception, become increasingly blurred.

Merta’s work can’t be described unequivocally as either figurative or abstract. It occupies an in-between space that extends not only to formal composition but also to a narrative potential. Starting from seemingly familiar objects, forms, and situations, the paintings develop a poetic openness that defies a single interpretation. The recognizable becomes the starting point for a train of thought in which different levels of meaning overlap and new connections emerge.

The term Gegenraum (counter-space) can be understood in the context of Joseph Beuys’ idea of “anti-art”: not as a contradiction, but as a counterpart, as a complementary relationship in the sense of symmetry. At the same time, the exhibition title Gegenraum refers to the central work Protiprostor / Gegenraum (2023–2026), in which this principle is carried forward on a painterly level. In reference to informal painting, spontaneous brushstrokes become connecting elements between two objects. Through the use of text within the image, these relationships are detached from a clear art-historical context. The painting establishes its own space in which formal, linguistic, and associative levels intertwine.