The idea of inviting Martin Zet as author of the education facilities was raised by the lecturers of educational programmes in PLATO. Their active participation and specification of functional demands of the artwork have been a necessary condition for the ensuing collaboration of the artist and the curator. The artist has created a literally “plastic” environment, which serves the pupils and students during educational programmes as well as the participants in creative activities and workshops with artists.

“In principle all our projects and our approach to the whole of the former hobby market have been borne by a rather naïve idea of art as a process of education and self-education. We understand it as creating and re-creating ourselves through participating in something which is different, new to us and (as yet) unknown. While we connect education with the other functions of art, we consider it an independent, specific activity, worthy in itself. An activity claiming or deserving, apart from the time and energy that we devote to it, its own visible place, a sign.

In creating such a space Martin Zet used two simple but effective points of departure. Encircling the place itself with colour and light clearly visible from afar as an independent, demarcated zone which is, however, not physically separated. Light as a permanently valid metaphor. The other principle is the idea of support for working together without which education and discovery—in whichever form we imagine them to be—are impossible. Hence a table. One around which we meet and at which we share our knowledge, experience as well as our ignorance. A table like a sculpture. A sculpture like a table. Completed by visitors at a time when the clay from which it had been made by the artist was still drying.

The situation is simple but open. It provides an elementary background, but does not enclose us in it. It anticipates but does not enforce anything.”

Marek Pokorný

Martin Zet (b. 1959, Prague, Czechoslovakia) studied in the Studio of Monumental Sculpture at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts between 1979 and 1985. From the beginning of the 1990s Zet’s oeuvre altered from ephemeral actions, performances and interventions in public spaces to videos and metamorphic gestures. In recent years he has researched the fate of public sculptures from the past regime. He reflects this theme through references to the works of his father, an important figurative sculptor and author of the memorial to the victims of the Nazi occupation at the Kobylisy Shooting Range. Initially Zet's disapproval of the world of art in its careerist, neo-liberal form led to the artist’s marginalisation and later to his acceptance by the youngest generation of artists. Between 2010 and 2016 he was a teacher at the Faculty of Art of Brno Technical University. He lives and works in Libušín near Kladno.