Výstavou Jiří Petrbok: Deník pacienta s umělcem

The exhibition Jiří Petrbok’s Patient’s Diary focuses on the theme of the self-portrait and presents the artist’s work from the 1990s to the present as a continuous record of a changeable, constantly questioned “self.”

For him, the self-portrait does not serve to confirm or stabilize identity, but becomes a space for transformation, masking, irony, and defense. In the paintings, the subject appears as a hybrid, a role, a symbol, or a body exposed to the pressures of the surrounding world. The exhibition’s title refers not only to illness but to the broader experience of a person subjected to the influence of institutions, social expectations, symbols, and their own body. Here, the “patient” is the one upon whom the world weighs heavily, yet who simultaneously keeps their own record so as not to become merely a case. Petrbok’s visual diary intertwines pain, the grotesque, humor, and anxiety, and across decades, it presents identity as a process—fragile, ambiguous, and never definitively concluded.

Delve deeper on a guided tour alongside the artist Jiří Petrbok and exhibition curator Otto M. Urban.