Telegraph visitors have previously encountered Jakub Janovský's work, specifically at the Game Owner exhibition he presented with Danish artist Søren Dahlgaard in the summer of 2025. Janovsky has now realized a solo project THE SHADOW LINE, realized at the Kunstverein im Reuchlinhaus in Pforzheim, Germany, from late October 2025 to early February 2026.
In his long-term work, Jakub Janovský focuses on the psychological portrait of a person functioning within a collective. He works with figures and visual motifs that often function as archetypes, not specific persons, but rather bearers of a general experience. His works thus open up the possibility for viewers to insert their own memories and personal experiences into them. At the same time, however, they offer space for new interpretations of historical and contemporary social issues.
The fundamental source of Janovsky's work is personal and collective memory, especially the experience of growing up in the socialist period. For him, the past does not act as a closed chapter, but rather as living material that intertwines with the present. The artist shows how deeply our current attitudes, ways of behaving and perceiving the world are shaped by the experiences we bring from our childhood and the environment we grew up in.
Janovsky's work continually reflects the vulnerability and uncertainty of society as well as the recurring human need to seek stability, order and a sense of security. Themes of the loss of freedom of thought, adaptation to the system and the difficulty of coming to terms with the past, which keeps returning in various forms and encroaching on the present, appear in his works. The exhibition THE SHADOW LINE develops this theme further. The title itself can be understood as a sign of the fragile and shifting boundary between safety and vulnerability, the known and the unknown. Janovsky works with motifs of architecture, interiors and human figures, which he places in situations that are distressing or ambiguous in meaning. The figures are often devoid of significant emotion and appear anonymous, while the surrounding environment exudes calmness or stillness. Thus, the whole does not create a specific narrative, but rather captures a certain psychological atmosphere or state of mind.
The works exhibited at the Kunstverein im Reuchlinhaus in Pforzheim, Germany, can act as records, traces or fragments of the past. The memories here are neither nostalgic nor idealized, but serve as a means to reflect on how past experiences shape our present reality. The tension in the exhibition comes not from dramatic situations or explicit messages, but from the overall atmosphere, the silence and the sense of lingering uncertainty.
For the THE SHADOW LINE exhibition, Janovsky designed a specific section, which includes works from his solo exhibition House of Cards, which you could see at the Central Bohemian Region Gallery in Kutná Hora during the summer of 2025. Here at the Telegraph you can buy Telegraphics designed by Jakub Janovsky, which also features a house of cards motif. 
