The White & Weiss Gallery opens its tenth season with a presentation of works by Czech painter Stanislav Diviš. The occasion also marks a symbolic return to the gallery’s beginnings: its inaugural show in 2016 featured the work of Michal Gabriel. Following Gabriel and Jaroslav Róna, Diviš is the third member of the Stubborn Ones whose work the gallery has brought to Slovak audiences. With this, White & Weiss remains true to what has been at the heart of its programme from the very beginning: bringing the finest representatives of Czech visual art to the Slovak public.

The exhibition What an Image Remembers presents a selection of works by Stanislav Diviš, one of the defining figures in Czech painting over the past four decades. Bringing together artworks from different periods and thematic cycles, it explores how personal, collective and cultural memory is transformed into fragments, rhythms, symbols and colourful pictorial structures.

Diviš’s paintings draw on visual records originally from other areas of life – children’s drawings, rehearsal plans, textile swatches, geometric constructions and unintentional traces of the working process. The artist alters their scale, colour arrangements and compositional hierarchy, stripping them of their original purpose and placing them in new contexts. In his paintings, order and chance, precision and deviation, and conscious decisions and spontaneous gestures converge.

The exhibition centres on the series Two Worlds and Memories of the 90 Spartakiad. The former begins with drawings by the artist’s son, Prokop, confronting a child’s intuitive imagination with the experience of an adult painter. The latter is based on rehearsal plans for a mass gymnastics performance scheduled for 1990 which, as a result of the political changes of the time, never took place. In Diviš’s paintings, the dots, arrows and lines that once defined the movements of thousands of performers become colourful scores or maps of an unknown ritual – a memento of an event that was meticulously planned but never took place. The selection is complemented by works from the series Remnants, Unwanted Touches and Colour Geometry, as well as the painting Gašpar, which recalls an early phase of the artist’s work. Here, memory is linked to anonymous labour and a vanished industrial world, to random traces of movement and touch, and to the tradition of geometric abstraction. The past does not return as a self-contained narrative. Instead, it persists in empty spaces, materials, and visual systems that painting reactivates and transforms.

The exhibition presents the painting as a place of transformation. A painting does not remember in the same way as a human being; it remembers through transformation. It allows the past to re-enter the present – not as a return to what once was, but as the possibility of a different way of seeing.

Stanislav Diviš (b. 1953, Kutná Hora) has been one of the leading figures in Czech painting since the 1980s. Together with Jiří David, he initiated the series of unofficial exhibitions Confrontations and, in 1987, co-founded the group the Stubborn Ones. He has exhibited extensively in the Czech Republic and internationally, including in Esslingen, Vienna and Graz. His work is held in the collections of major public institutions, including the National Gallery in Prague and the Prague City Gallery.