PAVEL BAŇKA: TEMPLES OF IMAGINATION

Venice Art Biennial, Personal Structures – Beyond Boundaries

Organized by the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague Cermak Eisenkraft Gallery in cooperation with the Cermak Eisenkraft Gallery

For its first-ever participation in the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, chose Pavel Baňka’s photographic project Temples of Imagination. The photographs, which the artist worked on between 2019 and 2024, are evidence of a creative enthusiasm that encourages a desire to experiment.

Post Construction and Post Cubist Rituals are expositional records of performance, discoveries made in action. Another series at the intersection of photography and painting, created in recent years, is Penetration (2021-2023), inspired by the artist’s interest in the mysterious movements of celestial bodies in the infinite universe. The photographs are backed by actual physical rotational movement during long exposures. Instead of anchoring them in reality, Baňka communicates here only through shapes and colours. Among the most recent works is also the series Temples of Symmetry, which uses the method of a mirror image connected symmetrically with the original one. This series also inspired the title of the whole project, which combines various forms of the artist’s play on the borderline between reality and dream imagery. All of Baňek’s photographic images share a common characteristic: they are realistic and imaginative at the same time. In this way, they create an imaginary temple in which the space for the viewer’s own imagination opens up, inspired by the artist’s original works.

Pavel Baňka (1941) has influenced several generations of artists as a photographer, teacher and mentor in the Czech Republic, the United States and Great Britain. He also founded several important activities that are still operating on a global scale today, even without him (the Prague House of Photography – today the House of Photography within the GHMP Prague, or the international magazine Fotograf distributed to thirty countries around the world). His works can be found in many collections in the Czech Republic (also in the UPM), Belgium, USA or France.