hunt kastner is pleased to present a new exihibition by the Prague based painter Daniel Pitin, entitled Men in the Garden. 

In this new body of work, the artist transports us to a special world suggestive of backstage film sets or the wooden huts of a garden colony. 

In the exhibition the artist combines painting, collage and sections from a personal diary from the 1960's, with video and architecture, completely transforming the gallery space through the use of wooden panels, boards and various materials and props.

"I was inspired in this exhibition by studio film set designs and constructions.  I am also fascinated by how people manage to inexpensively construct garden huts or bungalows.  They find some materials and then use them to put together a roof or a table.  These buildings are thrown together from various materials which previously had another function and history.  I work in much the same way; I find various images from films, or from my surroundings, which I then compose into the space of the painting.  I imagine a world that is deconstructed and then rebuilt in a new confrontation.  The wooden huts, and the way in which they are slapped together from various panels and lumber, remind me of the principal of how our memory works.  It is also determined by what has lodged itself there in the past - these memories then become rearranged and move towards the front of our consciousness, where they are confronted by our current perception.  For me, 'Men in the Garden' is a metaphor for our collective memory: they stand in an unprotected place in the garden, always on the lookout for something or someone."

At the exhibition opening, there will also be a presentation of the new publication The Last Chobotango, written and illustrated by the team of young screenwriters Vojtech Masek and Dzian Baban, and published by Lipnik Nakladtelstvi.  The Last Chobotango is the third and final comic in the trilogy The Monster Cabaret of Fred Brunhold.  The authors, Baban and Masek, tell an intricate, dark, grotesque and melancholy story about a bookkeeper named Damian Chobot, who had been brutally chobotized during the former regime.  Ever since this time, he has been wandering in search of his identity, battling with phantoms, like a deformed variant of an Eastern bloc comics superhero, caught up in a labyrinth of stories that are continuously developing, unfolding and contradicting each other.  www.tichysyndikat.cz

Daniel Pitin was born in 1977 in Prague and studied at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts in the studios of classical painting and conceptual media from 1994-2001.  During his studies at the Academy, he twice received the prize for the best studio work of the year, was the recipient of the Henkel Art Award for artists from Central and Eastern Europe in 2004, and in 2007 was awarded the Mattoni Prize for the best new artist work at the Prague Biennial 3.  His work can also be currently seen at Austrian Cultural Forum in Prague, at an exhibition featuring selected artists who were recipients of the KulturKontakt Austria grant supported residency program in Vienna (until 6.3.2009).

For more information, please contact:

info@huntkastner.com

www.huntkastner.com