Darren Gallery reopens its doors with a lethal level of sexual radiation, featuring the work of artist Lumír Hladík. Cozy Venom opens up to a domain we all know so much about and yet, and surprisingly… to this day, so little. Enter the realm of Adam and Eve, Eros and Lesbos, Cupid and Venus, and explore taboos in deeply shrouded inhibitions. Lumír Hladík’s art practice has been described as playing with shifts of meanings, by constructing his own proprietary contextual enigmas. It is typical of the artist to question; to probe, to investigate, to search for strange loops and hidden vortexes through endlessly playful aberrations of this mysterious force. His objects, ready-mades or drawings shift, derail, deviate and distort in order to rupture some of the most entrenched sexual axioms, taking us on a journey of dizzying extrapolations and juxtapositions: from the most subterranean fetishistic oddities to botched plastic surgery. It is the artist’s fascination with a seemingly inexhaustible infinitum of yet undiscovered contexts which can teach us that it is possible to cozy up to serpentine love and walk away unharmed…

Apollonia Vanova