CAVIN-MORRIS GALLERY

BODY ELECTRIC

MARCH 1 - APRIL 7, 2007

Cavin-Morris Gallery is pleased to introduce the drawings of Lubos Plny in his first solo exhibition, Body Electric. Working almost exclusively in ink, Lubos Plny meditatively charts the changes incurred in and on his body through life, surgeries, and in some cases, self-inflicted, experimental wounds. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, though not hospitalized, his curiosity for the vessel we call Body is boundless.

Working from the Czech Republic, Plny’s obsession with his body is localized to his self, wife and son. Though seemingly internal, his vision is far reaching. His drawings maintain a text-book like exactitude to the human anatomy, and yet Plny skews the precision by placing organs in places determined only by the artist, and not by nature. Mixed with fantastical interpretations of the human form, painstaking precision, patterning and hundreds of empirical notes jotted neatly on the paper, Plny’s drawings are a personal analysis of the physical aspects of love, marriage and childbirth and the recording of personal history. 

In the drawing ‘Vincent Lucien’ we are witness to a detailed account of the artist’s child exiting the womb. Plny bends the forms in an impossible way that compromises reality, yet enables the mother and child to lock eyes during this most human of moments. In ‘Homolka’, Plny draws from photographs of a thyroid surgery he underwent in which he requested the doctor to document the process on film. The artist’s body is of infinite wonder to him and works as his best subject.

This exhibition is one in a series featuring work from the Czech Republic begun several years ago with the visionary drawings of Anna Zemankova. Plny's work is also included in the influential ‘abcd’ collection of Paris, and in private contemporary collections in the US.