New sculptural relief works explore opacity, bodily transformation, and quiet resistance.

Curatorial Statement: Andrew Wilson

In the solo show soft_sighs synthesis, Paula Gogola presents a new series of works that, while departing from her usual medium of paint on canvas, rearticulate and metamorphose her motifs with a balance of strength and sen- sitivity.

These intricately layered reliefs project Gogola’s brooding figures onto a three dimensional plane: dense muscularity unfurls into shrouded repose, razor edges of steel curve into soft, yawning angles. Cold rigidity bonds with openness, pulsating strength with discretion, temerity with fugitivity. Tensed between such polarities, the opaque vitality that marks Gogola’s expanding oeuvre is here intensified, where survival hinges on secrecy, consis- tency on transmutation.

“The imperative of transparency,” writes philosopher Byung-Chul Han, “suspects everything that does not sub- mit to visibility. Therein lies its violence.” In the present, this imperative has become environmental, reproducing a systemic compulsion to exhibit, disclose, self-report. Algorithmic governance requires datasets abstracted from the soft tissue of bodies and the fragile folds of relations — discretized, compressed, knowable.

This legibility becomes cruelty as the data feeds back, sticking to the surface of skins flagged for suspicion, abjection, erasure. For Gogola’s figures, seemingly contemplative and transfixed, conspicuous motion merely makes one a moving target.

However, this veiled quietude does not signify withdrawal, but the drawing of battle lines elsewhere: beneath the hypervisible level of symbol and identity, and at that very infrastructural, procedural level of domina- tion itself.

Édouard Glissant urges us to “agree not merely to the right to difference” — the highest virtue in a world where the appearance of difference keeps the engines of appropriation running — but “agree also to the right to opacity... subsistence within an irreducible singularity.” Concealment generates new interiorities, spaces of experimentation and transformation that transcend individual identity: “opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics.”

Facing one another with heads turned away, an intimate, possibly psychic communication tran- spires between the figures at the level of gesture, posture, inclination. A weave of opacity that bonds its com- municants in an alliance whose means of survival, be it hiddenness, fugitivity, or subversion, is never mistaken for an end. Knowledge of that end, encrypted in prophecy and distributed in partial avowals, is foreclosed to those for whom knowledge is only ever instrumental. Yet this inaccessibility may also contain an invitation; a provocation to slip behind the darkening veil, to refuse the threshold of permissible existence...

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Why This Exhibition Matters

Paula Gogola’s exhibition soft_sighs synthesis extends painting into sculptural relief. The works move between image and object, where softened bodily forms appear suspended inside shallow architectural frames.

Rather than presenting fixed figures, the surfaces hold gestures that remain unresolved, suggesting a quiet resistance to full visibility. The exhibition shows how contemporary painting can expand into spatial structures while maintaining an intimate psychological tension.

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Artist Bio (short)

Paula Gogola (b. 1998, Banská Bystrica) is a painter whose work explores the body as a mutable form shaped by cultural narratives, transformation, and speculative thinking. Influenced by queer and feminist perspectives, her paintings and relief works investigate vulnerability, opacity, and shifting bodily states.

Gogola studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava and completed her master's degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Her work has been shown in exhibitions across Europe.

About Clauda Gallery

Clauda Gallery is a contemporary art space located in Prague’s Letná district. Founded in 2025 by Antonín Jirát as an extension of the Superpositions project, the gallery focuses on presenting works by Czech and international artists, ranging from emerging practices to established positions. Its program operates at the intersection of the local art scene and a broader international network, creating a platform that connects Prague-based production with collectors, curators, and institutions abroad.

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