Visiting Artist’s Studio in the Winter Semester 2025/2026 will be led by Thomas Helbig
In the winter semester 2025/2026, the artist Thomas Helbig has accepted the invitation to lead the Visiting Artist’s Studio. Applications are open until September 22, 2025. Information on how to apply can be found here. For any questions, please contact the studio’s assistant, Šárka Zahálková (sarka.zahalkova@vut.cz).
Thomas Helbig is a Berlin-based artist. His practice spans painting, drawing, and sculpture, with each medium unfolding in its own field. In his paintings, the main focus is colour – its intrinsic value, its materiality, and its capacity to create spatial illusions through countless shades of light and dark. In contrast, his collage sculptures embody a different kind of transformation of the source materials. His repertoire draws on discarded and thrown-away objects as well as kitschy plastic sculptures. Helbig combines these disparate elements into new forms, which appear as coded messages from an enigmatic present.
The programme designed by Thomas Helbig for the FFA students will primarily revolve around shared discussions, critiques of students’ work, and an inquiry into how artistic practice evolves within the academic setting – and how it might be further developed within that framework.
Programme structure
Thomas Helbig will be physically present on the following dates:
- September 21–25, 2025
- October 12–16, 2025
- November 9–13, 2025
- December 7–11, 2025
Mondays and Tuesdays will always be dedicated to individual consultations with students, while Wednesdays will be reserved for collective studio meetings. The collective Wednesday program will take place every week, including in the weeks between the above-mentioned blocks. It will include consultations, guest lectures, and additional programs.
As he himself states: “Since the Renaissance at the latest – and even more intensively in modernism – art has been theorized, dissected, and deconstructed. Theories and discourses, mostly of a sociological and technical nature, continue to analyze and permeate our concepts of art. Ever-developing reproduction technologies (photography, digitization, AI) constantly transform and challenge what we recognize as art and what we judge to be good or bad art. In an academic environment such as a university or an art school, we are inevitably confronted with critical demands to produce the ‘right’ kind of art – which often lacks personal urgency.
Given these circumstances, I would like to take a different, ‘inductive’ approach. I want to visit you in your studios where you make art. I want to see and discuss your works and experiments, to understand what you create and why you create it. If you agree, we will explore your path so far by looking at the artworks and studies you made before entering the university – that is, before you had to face academic standards. From there, with regard to the progress you have made to date, we can explore what your personal motivation or inner drive might be to make art, and which historical references may be helpful for your future creativity.
In short, my visit will focus on you as a person and on the relationship between your personality and your artwork.”
https://www.guidowbaudach.com/en/artists/thomas-helbig
Attachments
| Author | MgA. Šárka Zahálková, Ph.D. |
|---|---|
| Published | |
| Short URL | https://www.favu.vut.cz/en/students/news-and-calls/f26745/d301242 |
Responsibility: Mgr. Klára Ergensová, DiS.