Štěpán Vrbický is a Czech artist who has a very particular tie with Bucharest. During his artist residency in at the Czech Center in 2011, Štěpán Vrbický drew the reality of the city as he was perceiving it for the first time, with a stranger`s eye. Nothing spectacular about this, you may say. What is much more interesting is that the two weeks he spent in Bucharest were not the only time in which his hands were busy with the streets, markets or parks of this city. Before stepping in Bucharest, Vrbicky sketched several images of the city that had appeared to him at the border between dream and imagination. As he himself confesses in an interview, it was a challenge to rid of the mental mechanism that had helped him in the first stage, in order to replace past impressions with objective reality. To round up the project, giving it a third dimension, two years after his visit to Bucharest he realized a series of images that he kept in memory. 

The artist describes the project as „a collection of drawings about thought, oriented towards past, present and future, applied to a particular location”. Each of the three periods is represented in about 15 pencil sketches, both color and black and white, in a particular style that can be described a hyperrealistic. The exhibition brings about, besides the very particular imagery of Stepan Vrbicky , a very interesting observation and imagination exercise, easy to repeat or envision by any onlooker. Despite the fact that the project started more than two years ago, this is Vrbicky`s first exhibition in Romania.