Fire Fire Burn Burn
Group exhibition
Sofia Art Fair
2. 10. 2025 / 5. 10. 2025
HIDDEN Gallery will make its international art fair debut at Sofia Art Fair, held at the Sofia Tech Park in Bulgaria. We are proud to be presenting a curated selection of five Czech artists whose work embodies the gallery’s core focus: emotionally resonant figuration, psychological tension, and a strong personal visual language.
Our presence at the fair will occupy the largest space in the venue — two connected booths forming one of the most expansive presentations at the event. This allows us to treat the booth not just as a sales space, but as a true exhibition: a group show titled FIRE FIRE BURN BURN, featuring paintings and drawings that engage with themes of inner pressure, identity, collapse, and transformation.
Sofia is the first time we are bringing the full force of HIDDEN’s program to an international audience. Carefully curated, deeply felt, and visually uncompromising — this is what we stand for. And Sofia is just the beginning.
FIRE FIRE BURN BURN brings together five painters whose work responds to inner pressure, physical presence, and the shifting nature of identity in an overloaded world. This exhibition is not built around a single theme, but around different approaches to what it means to paint today — how to hold emotion, personal depth, and visual integrity in a surface. Each artist speaks in a different language, but all share a commitment to going deep — visually, emotionally, and materially.
Oskar Hořánek paints architecture as a system that shapes the individual from the outside in. His spaces are not backgrounds — they are active, psychological structures. His figures often appear built by their environment, as if adjusting to a system they can’t control.
Anna Krištofíková uses the self-portrait as a structure for exploring fragility, resistance, intimacy, and emotional clarity. Her paintings feel both personal and rigorously composed — where gestures, objects, and postures carry silent force.
Roman Košťál draws with restraint and precision. His charcoal works are not about death as drama, but about absence as fact. Stillness, silence, and spiritual tension unfold slowly across his surfaces. These are drawings that ask for time, and reward quiet attention.
Matěj Pokorný approaches painting physically. His surfaces are burned, scratched, layered, sometimes even cut. The human figure is not a subject to depict, but a site of accumulation, impact, and survival. His works feel like wounds that haven’t closed, but still hold form.
Marcela Putnová assembles her paintings from fragments: memory, mythology, symbolic detail, and emotional residue. Her images are charged yet sensitive, built from both archetypes and contemporary culture. She paints people like open systems — shaped by inheritance, overstimulation, and longing.
FIRE FIRE BURN BURN is not an exhibition about a topic. It’s an exhibition about urgency, structure, and visual thinking. It is not about aesthetic unity, but a shared position: these are works that hold weight — emotional, visual, personal. Whether through bodies, space, memory, or material, each artist builds images that act more like experiences than representations. These five artists didn’t meet by chance. This is not a generational selection, or a stylistic overview. What unites them is a relationship to painting as a site of pressure. The image is not an illustration — it is an encounter.