Václav Kočí - Strength to Strength

Artium is a space where art in all its forms meets people. Each year, its curatorial programme is guided by a key theme drawn from the KKCG Group’s narrative. After last year’s theme of Courage, the focus now turns to Innovation—an idea the organizers aim to explore on multiple interpretive levels. Opening the year is Václav Kočí’s bold pop-up intervention, drawing inspiration from the sleek form and cutting-edge design of a McLaren Formula 1 car.

When representatives of Allwyn approached the Artium team with the opportunity to present a Formula 1 car, the response was one of immediate excitement. It’s well known that luxury cars and art have long shared a common language—many renowned artists have in the past used car bodies as unconventional canvases. These collaborations have allowed artists to explore new forms and media, while also showcasing the innovative design and engineering of luxury automotive brands.

One notable example is the BMW Art Cars project, which has been running since 1975 and has included iconic artists such as Alexander Calder, Roy Lichtenstein, and David Hockney. The possibility of initiating a visual dialogue with a pinnacle of automotive engineering like a McLaren F1 car was both fascinating and a perfect fit for Artium’s 2025 curatorial theme: innovation.

What remained was to find the right artist—someone capable of rising to the challenge, whose visual sensibility would harmonize with the team’s black-and-orange colour scheme while bringing the necessary dynamism, energy, and strength. Strength to strength became the leitmotif of the entire project: the powerhouse McLaren team joining forces with Allwyn, KKCG’s strongest pillar, and a high-performance car brought into visual dialogue with a powerful site-specific installation by Václav Kočí.

Václav Kočí (*1981) is a conceptual painter based in Brno and the founder of Open Studios, a project that not only opens artists’ studios in Brno and Ostrava to the public, but also fosters ongoing professional networks among curators, artists, gallerists, and others in the field. He studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology (FaVU VUT), where he also earned his PhD in 2010 with a dissertation on Art in Public Space—a topic he continues to explore both artistically and as a lecturer at the university’s Faculty of Civil Engineering.

Curator of the exhibition: Linda K. Sedláková