Such Sweet Thunder
Curated by Domenico de Chirico
Gandy Gallery (remote exhibition during the COVID pandemic)
Presented from the artist’s studio
June 4 – September 11, 2020
Also presented at Artissima Art Fair, Italy

Such Sweet Thunder emerged during the suspended months of the pandemic, when exhibitions migrated from galleries into improvised and remote spaces. Presented through Gandy Gallery yet staged in Adam Vačkář’s own studio, the project brought together a series of sculptural works shaped through a long process of searching, collecting, and transformation.

The objects that appear in the exhibition were not fabricated from scratch. They were discovered. Vačkář gathered fragments of organic matter - branches, bones, roots, and other remnants of life—from swamps, forests, and lakes. These materials were left to weather, decay, and mutate in their environments before being retrieved and subjected to a second transformation through metal. Bronze and aluminium are applied without paint, allowing the natural forms to remain visible while shifting their material status. The resulting sculptures occupy an ambiguous territory between artifact and organism. They resemble relics unearthed from an uncertain time—part natural growth, part industrial residue. In Vačkář’s hands, organic forms become carriers of layered temporalities: traces of biological processes, geological erosion, and the accelerating rhythms of industrial production.

The works explore a tension between two radically different tempos. On one side stands the slow, patient metamorphosis of natural matter; on the other, the overwhelming scale of modern industrial development. When these two forces collide, the objects begin to change character. What was once purely natural becomes hybrid, almost mythological—forms that seem to remember the environments from which they emerged while also bearing the imprint of technological intervention. Such Sweet Thunder presents these sculptures as quiet witnesses of transformation: fragments suspended between past and future, reminders that the processes shaping the world rarely move in straight lines.