The Local Museum exhibition may well give the impression that it is missing the Work. There are a number of dusty sculptural plinths, but no statues standing on them. There are sketches of sculptures, objects and interventions that, for various reasons, did not come into being, or came into being only to turn out differently than the artist intended due to a confluence of circumstances. There is a small archive of xeroxes and photographic reproductions of sculptures by other artists, which Dominik Lang has freely arranged according to formal similarities. And there is a work-in-progress clay portrait, which the gallerist has to moisten regularly to prevent it from drying out and falling to pieces.

The feeling of absence is not unfounded. Yet there is also what is effectively missing from the exhibition. In order to make the previous two sentences mean something, let us begin with a reference to a film still. Let us imagine that a cameraman is filming an actor performing a certain activity. The actor is not necessarily active. Let's imagine, for example, that he is sitting in a chair and calmly flipping through a book on art, and let's go back to the cameraman. So the camera is on the actor leafing through the book. At some point, however, he changes the focal length of the lens and refocuses on the background. The reader turns into an indistinct blob and the contours of the background emerge. And suddenly we see where he has been sitting in the printer between the machines, leafing through the book he has just printed.

Similar to the cameraman who took us from the central motif to the background, Lang followed a similar approach when he created Local Museum. But the figure dissolving into a blur was the Work and the background was that which conditions the Work. Dominik Lang's work is contextual. He is particularly concerned with the conditions in which a work of art occurs (or can occur). He is interested in the objective conditions in art museums and galleries (features of exhibition spaces, craft workshops, curatorial workplaces, depositories, warehouses, etc.) as well as the conditions in private workrooms and warehouses, which are studios, sketchbooks or portfolios, and, in a marginal sense, ideas, patterns and external influences. The local museum is a descent primarily into this private sphere where the Work takes shape. 

How, then, to perceive the meeting of dirty, disheveled plinths with collages of reproductions of works by modernist sculptors and a "portfolio of failures"? If I have compared them to the background, then it is only obvious that Lang here attaches more importance to the background than to the central stain. Using his own example, he presents (and I emphasize this word because he is programmatically exploring how to "show something, show another person" by visual means) the artwork as a kind of point to which countless other images, information, events are attached... Lang is one of those artists who constantly rearrange things. This implicit volatility is part of the method of cuts that guides the huge mass of information in his exhibitions. They are also not definitive; rather, one could say that they tend towards something. In many cases, not only at the Local Museum, this inclination (and for us a message about what the stain might be) is Lang's deep need to be with sculpture.        

I have introduced the expression of background into the text by means of a camera focus. It resonates a kind of backwards, spatial deployment of one thing behind another, so there was a logic to the simile based on the representation of three-dimensional space in the two-dimensional medium of film. However, since Dominik Lang's many vectors of his work tend towards the sculptural medium, it might be appropriate to replace it with an expression of the surroundings, at least at the end. Our stain is wrapped nicely on all sides.     

Jiří Ptáček