‘Small Sculptures’ was a selection of pictures depicting small artworks, all found objects or assisted ‘ready mades’ that are accompanied by short texts. Originally produced as postcards, they were presented as large prints, lifted from the comforts of their modest proportions to an almost monumental scale, the pictures once again become objects.

Subjects include a tube of paint ripped open and discarded by an art student, offering simultaneously a simile and a metaphor for a rose, or two pencil stubs forming a visual-verbal pun for a castle. Here, these objects lose their attachment to the familiar, the everyday observations and references to philosophy, literature and the avant-garde canon of western art.

In ‘Work’, the artist has documented every cigarette break he has taken when installing exhibitions over the past eighteen months. The pictures provoke the question of the nature of creative labour and allude to the romantic ideal of the artist. They too are stories of a kind and often the source of small accidents from which something like a small sculpture may eventually emerge.




An artist, teacher and occasional writer, Pavel Büchler is interested in what art makes possible to realise: both to think and to do. Summing up his own practice as "making nothing happen", he is committed to the catalytic nature of art, its potential to draw attention to the obvious and revealing it as ultimately strange, and creating the conditions, “like an incompetent electrician”, to short-circuit incompatible perspectives.

Pavel Büchler was born in Prague where he studied at the School of Graphic Arts and the Institute of Applied Arts in the 1970s. He came to Britain in 1981 and co-founded the Cambridge Darkroom Gallery (1983-87). He was Head of School of Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art (1992-96) and in 1997 he was appointed Research Professor in Art and Design at Manchester Metropolitan University.


12:00:00 - 12:04:33, 17 October 2008


The Problem of God


Small Eclipse