THE FOLD

Overview

Featuring artists like Ira Svobodová, Jo Hummel, Åsa Johansson, François Bonnel, Sali Muller and Jan Kaláb, The Fold is a dynamic group exhibition that celebrates folding as a powerful force in contemporary art. This exhibition showcases a diverse range of artistic approaches that reinterpret the fold not only as a physical gesture but also as a conceptual framework.

Each artist featured in The Fold brings a distinct vision to the exhibition, demonstrating the expressive versatility of folding across both material and metaphor. Jo Hummel embraces the humble origins of paper through intricate collages, transforming it into a vessel to explore metaphysical, psychological and anthropological themes. Ira Svobodová offers painted tributes to the elegance of folded forms, positioning paper as subject rather than medium. Her works reimagine the fold through representation, capturing its spatial poetry with precision and grace.

By engaging with the fold as both process and idea, the exhibition challenges traditional boundaries and opens new possibilities for innovation and expression. The Fold invites viewers to reconsider the physical and conceptual potential of materials often overlooked, offering fresh insights into the role of gesture, form, and materiality in contemporary art.

Works

Installation Views

Press release

In The Fold, form is not fixed: it bends, curves, and creases into new possibilities. This group exhibition explores the fold as both gesture and concept: a meeting point between structure and softness, control and spontaneity. The works on view share a sensitivity to transformation, inviting the viewer to reflect on how surfaces, be they paper, paint, ceramic, or mirror, can shift meaning through a simple fold.

Rather than offering a singular definition, The Fold reveals the manifold expressions of folding across contemporary practice. In these works, the fold is a material process, a visual metaphor, a philosophical question, and a mode of perception. Whether subtle or overt, the act of folding becomes a way to consider transition, layering, concealment, and emergence.

Ira Svobodová approaches the fold as image rather than action. Her meticulously painted compositions elevate paper from passive support to active subject. Architectural and rhythmic, her works translate the delicate act of folding into visual structure, rendering fragility and precision with equal weight. In this context, the fold becomes both an illusion and a quiet meditation on space and form.

Jo Hummel delves into the metaphysical dimensions of folding. Working with collage and paper, she treats the fold as a site of inquiry, where psychology, materiality, and abstraction meet. Each fold is an actor in her pieces, a bridge that melds independent elements to create a unified dialogue. They are an active decision: layers are placed here, and not there, reflecting on the place of all agents in relation to the other.

Åsa Johansson’s ceramics add an unexpected material voice to the exhibition. In her hands, clay, traditionally associated with solidity, is made to crease, bend, and flow. These works appear to defy their own density, echoing the softness and fluidity of more ephemeral materials. Her folds challenge assumptions, transforming the ceramic into something paradoxically weightless and alive.

Fraçois Bonnel introduces the fold as a perceptual experience. Within his layered paintings, translucent forms hover and overlap. There is no literal bending of material: instead, the fold emerges in the interplay of transparency, color, and depth. These visual folds act like ghosts in the image, subtle shifts that pull the viewer across dimensions.

Sali Muller engages the fold through reflection, both literal and psychological. Her manipulation of mirrored materials creates fractured surfaces that disorient and distort the viewer’s image. Her work focuses on questions of identity and the placement of the self. Hence, foldings in her work acts as a rupture in perception, unsettling our relationship to ourselves. As the surface bends, so too does the viewer’s sense of stability, prompting deeper questions around identity and self-awareness.

Jan Kaláb expands the notion of folding beyond surface and into space itself. His sculptural canvases explode off the wall in vibrant, undulating forms that play with dimensionality. What begins as painting quickly becomes an object, a movement, a fold in space. Kaláb’s works vibrate with color and energy, offering a kinetic reimagining of how form can behave.

Together, these artists show that the fold is never just a fold. It's a turning point, a transformation, a new edge from which to see. The Fold invites viewers to dwell in these transitions, to inhabit the in-between, and to embrace the poetic complexity of surfaces that refuse to stay still.