Guided Tour: Argus & Medusa

A guided tour of the exhibition "Argus & Medusa: On Hope in Difficult Times" with curators Michaela Šilpochová, Otto M. Urban and Leoš Válka. The tour will also feature artists John Beard, Wolf von Lenkiewicz, Tom de Freston, Conrad Botes, Martin Gerboc, Sylvie Choisnel and others.

John Beard is an Australian artist with Welsh roots, working across Britain, Australia and Europe. His work focuses on portraiture, landscape and the relationship between image, memory and vision. His paintings begin with a specific source, which he transforms through repeated overpainting, layering and scraping into blurred, almost ghostly forms - he is interested in the moment when an image begins to dissolve or transform into an uncertain trace. His work has been exhibited at Tate St Ives, the Gulbenkian's Centro de Arte Moderna in Lisbon and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In 2006 he won the Wynne Prize for landscape painting, and in 2007 the Archibald Prize for portraiture.

Conrad Botes works in painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and comics. His work combines comic stylization with grotesque imagery, dark humour and biblical motifs; his paintings and sculptures address violence, gender, racial relations, guilt and power. He studied illustration at the Koninklijke Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten in The Hague and earned his master's degree in fine art from Stellenbosch University. In 2004 he received the Absa l'Atelier Award. Together with Anton Kannemeyer he founded the magazine Bitterkomix, through which they have been commenting on South African society, politics and power relations since the early 1990s. He lives and works in Cape Town.

Tom de Freston is a British artist, writer and illustrator based in Oxford. His work combines painting, film, text and performance, drawing on literature and myth while exploring themes of human vulnerability and loss. He studied fine art at Leeds Metropolitan University and art history at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of the book "Wreck: A Story of Art and Survival" (2022).