Arts Thread

David Čumalo
Painting

Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp

Graduates: 2025

Specialisms: Painting / Drawing / Installation/Sculpture

My location: Antwerp, Belgium

david-umalo ArtsThread Profile
Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp

David Čumalo

david-umalo ArtsThread Profile

First Name: David

Last Name: Čumalo

University / College: Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp

Course / Program: Painting

Graduates: 2025

Specialisms: Painting / Drawing / Installation/Sculpture

My Location: Antwerp, Belgium

About

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.

In recent years, I have been working with fresco-like techniques on canvas, developing a personal method that allows me to scrape away layers of paint. Even when the surface is stripped back, a residue remains—traces of what once was, still lingering. Paradoxically, through this process of removal, something essential emerges. The paintings carry within them the memory of their own making. These works on canvas explore the phenomenon of memory and nostalgia—something initially vivid and intense, but gradually fading, dissolving into silence. Yet within this silence, fragments reappear: a color, a scent, a detail.