Radek Brousil’s dual exhibition between Wrocław and London unfolds time as memory, matter, and political critique, linking image, material, and labor in a haunting visual counter-tempo.
Radek Brousil’s What You See is Not Here Tomorrow, an ambitious dual-site exhibition across Krupa Gallery’s venues in Wrocław and London, marks both a personal and institutional threshold. This two-part installation, split across countries yet spiritually cohesive, stages time as both a haunting absence and a material presence. The bifurcated format—the artist in parallel with the gallery's geographic expansion—becomes a conceptual device, a portal stretched between past and future selves.
The 25 black oil paintings on jute operate like shadowed sundials, each embedded with photographic transfers of clock hands culled from religious and political facades. These gestures fold memory into material—historical, psychological, and corporeal time compressed into painterly surfaces. Here, photography is less a tool of reproduction than an excavation of residual meaning. Brousil invokes the visual grammar of counterclockwise movement, inviting a contemplation of the inverse, the undone, the not-yet. The number of works—one more than the hours of the day—pushes at the very limits of our temporal architecture.
In Wrocław, a sculptural installation crafted from aged PRL-era tabletops reanimates objects from a bygone domestic and labor economy. These surfaces, once sites of human effort, are transformed into contemplative planes for considering the commodification of time itself. In London, church candle stands fashioned from table legs—echoes of ancient timekeeping devices—act as eerie relics of a labor history that is both forgotten and fetishized. Brousil’s subtle conflation of sacral and industrial forms distills a quiet violence: the transformation of craft into spectacle, of time into product.
Brousil’s work is deeply informed by transnational movement and lived temporality. From the frenetic clockwork of New York City to the monastic stillness of Český Krumlov, the artist translates these contrasting temporalities into layered visual metaphors. His process is not just geographically dispersed but spiritually resonant, positioning the artworks as moments of slowed perception, where political critique merges with aesthetic meditation. These are not static objects but events—unfolding, delayed, recursive.
What You See is Not Here Tomorrow resists closure. The works operate as visual palimpsests, where histories—personal, political, and collective—are overwritten yet never erased. Time, for Brousil, is not a measure but a material. And through it, he opens a dialogue about the pressures of modernity, the remnants of power, and the elusive pursuit of meaning in a world increasingly defined by speed and spectacle.
