Pixels and Poetics: Private View

Pixels and Poetics: Sudek, Funke and the Influence of New Technologies on the Development of Photography connects the world of interwar analogue photography with the visual aesthetics of today’s digital age. It offers visitors a unique opportunity to trace how the image has transformed over two centuries—from tangible traces of light to synthetic visual worlds created by artificial intelligence.

The exhibition presents iconic works by Josef Sudek and Jaromír Funke, whose photographs demonstrate how light, composition, and atmosphere can transform reality into poetic or constructive visual worlds. These classical approaches are complemented by historical photomontages, double exposures, and analogue manipulations, showing how deeply the desire to reshape the image is established in the tradition of photography. The historical works in the exhibition are drawn from the PPF Art collection, which plays a key role in preserving and presenting Czech photographic heritage.

The contemporary section of the exhibition develops this dialogue through artists working with AI and generative technologies. In her work Your Addiction Is the Message, Barbora Trnková reveals the mechanisms of visual dependency in the digital environment and the role of technologies in shaping our perceptions. Lenka Hamošová, in the project Troubling GAN and the series Strange Attractions, explores both the aesthetics and limitations of neural networks, showing how algorithms create and reproduce stereotypes or visual hallucinations. A collaborative work by Trnková and Javůrek, Generation of Princesses, uses generative models to critically reflect on pop-culture ideals of femininity and their digital reconstruction. The exhibition offers a visually compelling and accessible perspective on how our understanding of the image, reality, and the things we are willing to believe when we look, is changing.

Organised by the Czech Centre with the kind support of the PPF Foundation.

EXHIBITION OPENING
Tuesday 20 January 2026, 6.30 – 8.30 pm
Free entry

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