Ondřej Navrátil
Ondřej Navrátil on Time Travel, Myth-Making, and Sculpting the Absurd
Description:
In this 46th episode of the HIDDEN Podcast—and the first in a special mini-series with recent AVU graduates, we visit the diploma installation of sculptor Ondřej Navrátil at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. What begins as a playful conversation about stones, wild boars, and fictional fossils quickly unfolds into a layered exploration of sculpture as narrative, myth-making, and lived imagination.
Ondřej shares stories of transporting 300 kilograms of stone from a quarry, sculpting a time machine sphere, and carving fossils into the rockface of a Czech limestone pit. But beneath the absurdity lies a poetic sense of time, both personal and planetary. His work blends humor with sincerity, sci-fi with antiquity, and meticulous craft with total invention.
The result is a "sculptural comic," as he calls it a world where traveler get stuck in time, gods drown in sap, and relics from the future lie buried in the past.
Topics Discussed:
Inventing personal mythology through sculpture
The story of a stranded time traveler and his lithium battery
Reliefs of Hercules, ancient disco bulls, and mythic beetles
What it’s like to chisel directly into a quarry wall
Creating sculptures from Carrara marble and hammered steel
Building floating scaffolding to carve a 4.5m ammonite
Using humor, fiction, and doubt to activate the viewer
Why his family's metal workshop in Zábřeh shaped his practice
Key Quotes from Ondřej Navrátil:
“The best part is when people aren't sure if it’s real. That uncertainty is where the work begins.”
“Sometimes you find the eye in the stone—you don’t sculpt it, you uncover it.”
“I think every sculptural base is a sculpture of its own.”
“A god stuck in sap can’t die—he just waits, for someone to break the amber.”
“People back then didn’t always know why things were the way they were—but they felt it. It wasn’t rational knowledge, it was something deeper. A kind of wisdom stored in the body, in nature, in stories.”
Guest Information:
Ondřej Navrátil is a Czech sculptor whose diploma work at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague took the form of a fictional excavation site. Mixing relief carving, full-scale sculptures, hand-forged steel, and mythic storytelling, his installation presents a surreal narrative about a time traveler trapped in the past—and the fictional team that uncovers him.
Ondřej works with a range of materials, including marble, ceramic, bronze, steel, and even tree sap. His objects often look like archaeological finds, relics from a future mythology. Deeply influenced by Greek myths, geology, comics, and humor, his work questions the boundaries between invention and belief.
Rooted in craft and family heritage—his grandfather founded a metal workshop in Moravia—Ondřej approaches each sculpture as a story, waiting to be unearthed.
