Curators Michaela Šilpochová, Otto M. Urban, and Leoš Válka will lead a guided tour of the exhibition Argus & Medusa, with selected artists in attendance: John Beard, Wolfe von Lenkiewicz, Tom de Freston, Conrad Botes, Martin Gerboc, Sylvie Choisnel, and others.

John Beard is an Australian artist of Welsh descent who has long been active in Great Britain, Australia, and Europe. His work focuses primarily on portraiture, landscape, and the relationship between the image, memory and vision. His paintings are often based on a specific model, which he transforms into a blurred, almost ghostly form through repeated overpainting, layering, and wiping. Rather than a precise record, he is interested in the moment when the image begins to disappear, reveal itself, or transform into an indistinct vestige. His work has been exhibited at institutions such as Tate St Ives, Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian in Lisbon, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In 2006 he won the Wynne Prize for landscape painting, and in 2007 the Archibald Prize for portraiture. His work is currently featured in the exhibition Argus & Medusa at DOX.

Sylvie Choisnel is a French artist and academic sculptor who has lived and worked in Prague since the 1990s. She focuses on sculpture, painting, and drawing but also works with ceramics and wax. Her work is based on a distinctive fusion of figurative, animalistic, and fantastical motifs. She studied at the Faculté des Arts Plastiques and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She has exhibited in both solo and group shows around the Czech Republic, and her work is currently featured in the Argus & Medusa exhibition at DOX.

Tom de Freston is a British artist based in Oxford. In his work he combines painting, film, text, and performance to create dark, multilayered visual worlds in which he often draws inspiration from literature and mythology and explores themes of human vulnerability and loss. He studied fine art at Leeds Metropolitan University and art history at the University of Cambridge. His book Wreck: A Story of Art and Survival (2022) is a personal text about creativity, trauma, and the possibilities of art which was inspired by Théodore Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa. He frequently collaborates with his wife, the writer Kiran Millwood Hargrave, and together they have published, among other works, the picture books Julia and the Shark (2021), which was named Waterstones Children’s Gift of the Year and was shortlisted for the Waterstones Book of the Year, and Leila and the Blue Fox (2022), winner of the Wainwright Prize for Children’s Writing. Tom de Freston’s work is currently featured in the exhibition Argus & Medusa at DOX.

Martin Gerboc is a painter and writer. His paintings are often exhibited within the context of contemporary European and world art. He made his literary debut in 1998 with the book of philosophical essays Myslením ku kríze. Nihilizmus je pragmatizmus (Thinking Our Way to a Crisis: Nihilism Is Pragmatism), which was followed by five more books of philosophical essays, miscellaneous writings, and texts on contemporary painting. In 2020 he published his first collection of poetry, Nezvratné básne (Irreversible Poems), followed by another collection titled Tance traumatu & marnosti (Dances of Trauma & Vanity) in 2026. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava (VŠVU), at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania in the US, and at the Kolding School of Design in Denmark. He completed his doctoral studies at VŠVU and taught for several years at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he also earned his habilitation. He has also filmed several music videos for goth and punk bands, and he has curated a number of exhibitions of contemporary painting in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Wolfe von Lenkiewicz is a British artist with German and Polish roots. He comes from a family of painters. He studied philosophy the University of York and established himself as an artist in the early 2000s. His work draws on familiar motifs from art history as well as contemporary visual culture, which he transforms into new, ambiguous compositions. He employs citation, appropriation, and juxtaposition, referencing mythology and iconic works by Albrecht Dürer, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Théodore Géricault, Hieronymus Bosch, and others. In recent years he has combined classical oil painting with digital techniques and visual models based on artificial intelligence, without abandoning his emphasis on the craft of painting. His works have been exhibited at institutions such as the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, the Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki, the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, and the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille. His work is currently featured in the exhibition Argus & Medusa at DOX.