Arts Thread

My name is David Čumalo, I come from the Czech Republic. I am a visual artist and painter and I graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and the Royal Academy in Antwerp. The way I work in my artistic practice is that I often choose an unusual space that becomes the starting point of my work. It may be an environment where I have never been before, and therefore I establish a relationship with the place through coexistence with it. This process of cognition determines the motifs of my paintings. On the contrary, I am also interested in places where I have been before, which shaped me and had a major impact on my life. I am curious about what has remained, what has changed over time, or what has disappeared completely. I think most of us have experienced a moment when we returned to a place we hadn’t visited for a long time, perhaps our hometown, which seemed familiar on one hand and very foreign on the other. It is this tension between the familiar and the strange that fascinates and influences me. In my paintings and installations, I often work with feelings of alienation, loneliness, absence, and nostalgia. I often install my work directly in the studio environment, where I strive to capture the essence of the place and convey my relationship to it.