Dúbravský presents an empathetic yet critical study of the environment and its progressing devastation. The Anxiety of Subimago points to an unresolved tension between humankind and nature, resulting in frustrating restlessness akin to an adolescent subimago state—a winged preadult life stage of the delicate-looking mayfly. Over a layered wall, an installation of molted studio canvases, Dúbravský presents a series of new large-format acrylic paintings on canvas with sweaty renderings of huddled running bodies paired with deserted landscapes and small-format portraits of pollinating bees and insects in varying states of metamorphosis.

(Sex and skincare are two of the artist’s many hobbies outside of art; and his paintings have the same glow you might have after a hydra facial combined with a three-day celery-juice fast.) In his series “Runners,” which depicts a group of men who are running next to each other and have mythical horns attached to their heads, Dúbravský has continuously been referencing the same gay porn video. The paintings are alienated screenshots from an anniversary video of a gay porn company in which thirty porn actors are running on the beach. Three years ago, he had stumbled upon the film and has since chopped it up in small frames, which reappear in the form of paintings—sometimes of majestic size, “Wet sand”,  for example, measures nearly three meters in height. This monumentality intertwined with the imagery of nude men, which appear more like souls who jumped out of a fairytale your grandmother read to you as a child—uncertain if they are demonic or angelic—empsizes the various forms of desire and sexual potency inherent to Dúbravský’s paintings, without surrendering to merely sex-driven, animalistic appetites. It is not about sex, and yet it is. It is the same dichotomy as between beauty and darkness and romanticism and the perverse. Dúbravský hybridizes these chasms through acrylicized smoke, which wafts across both utopian and dystopian gardens. 

The above excerpt is from the exhibition essay The Age of Anxiety, contributed by Claire Koron Elat, 2023.

At his most painterly, his outlines bleed into body, and the borders between expression and accident blur. Some of his compositions teeter right on the precipice of falling apart, held together ‘just so’ by only the most lightly worn technique, and an eye that knows an awful lot about the historical canon. The latter has seen enough to know that the nature of the pictorial imaginary is always in flux. In their many-coloured coolness, Dúbravský’s figures are contemporary subjects.

The above excerpt is from Andrej Dúbravský, Naturist, by KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin curator, Nadim Samman, 2022.