XRay

The X-Ray series occupies a singular position within David Černý's practice — at once intimate in scale and unsettling in implication. Initiated in 2013 and continuing through the present, the works take their conceptual departure from a deeply mundane, hypermodern ritual: passing through airport security. Struck by the quiet violence of the X-ray scanner — its capacity to expose, without permission, the private contents of personal objects — Černý began casting three-dimensional replicas of everyday items in translucent epoxy and polymer resin. Guns, bullets, grenades, and toy babies are suspended within these luminous blocks, rendered eerily visible, as if permanently frozen mid-scan. The result is a body of work that transforms the logic of surveillance into sculpture. The series encompasses a range of motifs and formats, from compact wall-mounted reliefs to fully realized assemblages. Works such as Violin — a transparent violin case harbouring firearms and a grenade alongside miniature plastic infants — are emblematic of Černý's method: familiar objects defamiliarized through radical transparency, their latent danger made literal. Other pieces in the series, including Suitcase, Travel Bag, and the various Guns works, accumulate into a taxonomy of threat, where the banality of luggage and the lethality of weapons are collapsed into a single image. The colour variants — green, blue, and others — introduce a further aesthetic register, one that oscillates between clinical objectivity and something approaching the decorative, making the violence no less present but somehow harder to locate. Černý's X-Ray works function as a sustained meditation on visibility, control, and contemporary anxiety. They expose not only weapons, but the systems of power that seek to contain them — and the unease that persists regardless. Represented internationally through galleries including ARTAFFAIR (Regensburg/Munich) and HOHMANN (Palm Springs), and displayed prominently in Černý's own museum, the MUSOLEUM in Prague, the series has become central to understanding the artist's broader interrogation of the post-Cold War world: a place where security theater and political violence coexist in unsettling proximity, rendered here in resin, with unsettling clarity.