Tonus brings together the painting of Roman Bicek and the objects of Matej Gavula in an exploration of form, matter, anatomy, and the tension between corporeality and abstraction.
TONUS
ROMAN BICEK
MATEJ GAVULA
CURATED BY LUCIA GAVULOVÁ
OPENING
TUESDAY
OCTOBER 13, 2026, from 18.00
TONUS
ROMAN BICEK
MATEJ GAVULA
Curated by Lucia Gavulová
The exhibition Tonus brings together the painter Roman Bicek and the sculptor Matej Gavula. Their works meet here in an associative register of forms. The counterpoint to Gavula’s objects – “bodies” without anatomy – is the anatomical explicitness of Bicek’s latest drawings and paintings. Gavula works with matter that he finds in the form of objects originally associated with architecture, design, or utilitarian function. He rewrites the history of their original purpose, arrives at other constellations, and creates their new “anatomies.” Bicek works with the matter of the image. In his latest drawings and paintings, he captures fragments of the human body and muscular tonus. He builds up, thickens, dissolves, and overlays the matter on the canvases. It flows in the form of fields of colour, from which a person or a bodily detail emerges here and there or disappears within them. In both approaches, there is a search for an optimal form, which is often achieved through transferring, rearranging, and repeatedly overpainting. The tension, transformed into the final immobile spatial or planar object, is present in the moment, situation, observation, volumes, fields of colour, strokes of the pencil across the paper, and, last but not least, in the statement itself.
ROMAN BICEK
ROMAN BICEK (1981) is a visual artist working across painting, collage, drawing, and their various combinations. His subject matter and overall expression are characterised by an expressive, dynamic, vivid, radical, and distinctly critical approach to commenting on developments in society and the political landscape. His work draws on pop and street art influences, which enter his paintings primarily through their formal and expressive qualities.
In 2008, he graduated in Painting and Other Media from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava (VŠVU). He also spent two years at Wimbledon School of Art in London and studied at Leyton Sixth Form College from 1997 to 1999.
In 2023, he exhibited at the Central Slovak Gallery in Banská Bystrica, where his project Obst & Muse formed a temporary part of the Permanent Exhibition of Stano Filko. That same year, he presented the solo exhibition Exitable Boy, They All Said at the Ján Koniarik Gallery in the Trnava Synagogue. In 2022, he exhibited at Gallery Sumec with the exhibition Glück muß man haben.
He has also worked as a lecturer at the Department of Intermedia at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. He lives and works in Bratislava, in Petržalka and at his studio in Zlaté Piesky.
MATEJ GAVULA
MATEJ GAVULA (1972) studied Stone Sculpture at the Secondary School of Applied Arts (1986–1990), followed by studies at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, where he graduated from the Glass Studio in 1996. He works across the media of sculpture, object, photography, video, action and performance. He is also involved in exhibition architecture and scenography.
In his work, he transforms impulses drawn from urban environments and architecture into a sculptural language. He recontextualises the legacy of late modernism through the recycling of images, materials and craft techniques. His work is represented in the collections of the Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava City Gallery, the East Slovak Gallery in Košice, and the Central Slovak Gallery in Banská Bystrica.
He currently teaches at the Department of Sculpture, Object and Installation at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. His recent exhibitions include Krajina promptov at Phoinix Gallery, presented together with Lucia Gašparovičová, and the collaborative project Človek zvíťazil, aréna Jána Medlena with Jonáš Gruska at tranzit.sk, both taking place this year.
As part of his research, he focuses on the life and work of his father, the sculptor Juraj Gavula (†2026). He lives and works in Bratislava.
TONUS
Within the exhibition Tonus, the primary motivation behind its conception was the friendship between the artists Roman Bicek and Matej Gavula and their mutual respect for each other’s work, as well as the desire to realise a project that would bring sculpture and painting together, taking their current artistic practices as its point of departure. These are two fundamental media of visual art, which can be understood as different ways of organising matter rather than as two incompatible categories. The encounter between the two artists in the exhibition is not based on a simple opposition, but on an associative register of forms in which both approaches interpenetrate.
The title of the exhibition derives from the term tonus. The word originates from the Greek tonos, meaning tension, stretching or exertion. In medicine, the term refers to the basic degree of muscular tension that persists even when a muscle is not engaged in conscious movement; it is therefore neither entirely passive nor inactive at rest. It nevertheless maintains a certain degree of tension that enables it to respond to stimuli, stabilise the body and maintain its position. It is a state between rest and activity.
For the exhibition, what matters above all is the understanding of tonus as a degree of internal tension that enables a given form to maintain its structure. Here, this state is translated into a consideration of matter, corporeality and sculptural/painterly form. Tension is present in shape, material or gesture. In sculpture, this may involve the relationship between weight, gravity, support, pliability and the resistance of the material. A sculptural object appears motionless, yet its form can convey a sense of pressure, compression, expansion or stretching. In painting, tonus may be present in the intensity of the painterly gesture, the layering of pigment, the tension between line and surface, or the way in which corporeality is articulated. In this sense, the physiological term is not being used literally, but rather extended metaphorically. Within these possibilities, the exhibition explores several relationships: softness and firmness, relaxation and contraction, passivity and activity, the anatomical and the non-anatomical body.
Among other things, the exhibition’s concept also considers whether painting can be understood as the shaping of matter and sculpture as gesture. This perspective allows us to regard Bicek’s paintings not primarily as pictorial counterparts to Gavula’s objects, but as equivalent material processes. Gavula’s objects, in turn, can be read as forms that establish a spatial and scalar relationship with the viewer’s body. They do not need to depict a specific body in order to evoke corporeal associations. Bicek’s more anatomically explicit drawings and paintings, in turn, can convey an experience of the body through deformation, fragmentation or painterly gesture. In both cases, tonus may be what holds the form together — literally or metaphorically.
— Lucia Gavulová
BAŠTOVÁ 6
811 03 BRATISLAVA
TUEASDAY TO FRIDAY
14.00 - 18.00
AND DAILY BY APPOINMENT