Jiří Petrbok: Deník pacienta

Jiří Petrbok’s exhibition The Patient’s Diary focuses on the theme of the self-portrait and presents the artist’s work from the 1990s to the present as a continuous record of a shifting, constantly questioned “self.”

For him, the self-portrait does not serve to confirm or stabilize identity, but becomes a space for transformation, disguise, irony, and defense. In the paintings, the subject appears as a hybrid, a role, a symbol, or a body subjected to the pressures of the surrounding world. The exhibition’s title refers not only to illness but to the broader experience of a person subjected to the influence of institutions, social expectations, symbols, and their own body.

The “patient” is the one upon whom the world weighs heavily, yet who simultaneously keeps his own record so as not to become merely a case. Petrbok’s visual diary intertwines pain, the grotesque, humor, and anxiety, and across decades presents identity as a process—fragile, ambiguous, and never definitively concluded.

The exhibition traces how this principle manifests itself across different periods of the artist’s work: from early paintings of physical and existential transformation, through motifs of masks, protective suits, and fragmented figures, to works in which family, institutions, public space, and language increasingly enter the self-portrait. The Patient’s Diary is not an intimate confession in the traditional sense, but an urgent portrait of a person who, in the space between vulnerability and self-irony, attempts to maintain his own coherence.