You are on Přemysl Otakar II Square in České Budějovice. A vibrant, full-of-people heart of the city. And right now, you are standing before a towering, abstract sculpture. The author is Czech artist Michal Cimala, whose work fuses sculpture, painting, design, and music.
This object is impossible to miss in any space. Its shape and colour stand out from the surrounding historic buildings. The sculpture rises about 4 meters high – about the height of a tree. It weighs approximately 2300 kilograms, roughly the mass of a small car. Despite that, the structure resembles a lightweight, organic web or mesh, as if spun from strands of light and frozen in motion.
All surfaces of the sculpture are openwork – they have a dense network of holes through which the surroundings are visible. The material appears porous and semi-transparent, with a delicate, lace-like texture. But don’t be fooled by appearances – the object is made from massive steel sheets, each three centimetres thick.
The base of the sculpture is composed of three elongated ovals. Each is approximately one meter wide. Together they form a triangular shape. The shape of the statue is organic and irregular. The sculpture consists of two planes – sheets of metal material that intersect at a right angle. It’s somewhat as if one of the planes is supported by the other. The first one stands perpendicular to the ground. The second, slightly shorter, has an organic shape with two protrusions reaching out toward the open space. The taller plane contains a large hole – a void that takes up nearly half of its surface. The open part has an irregular, organic shape and is positioned at the centre of the plane. Its form resembles that of a halved apple.
The silhouettes of the passers-by stand beside it, emphasising the sculpture’s impressive height and airy, cathedral-like presence. Though massive and heavy, its design evokes lightness and upward movement, like a piece of architecture grown organically, rather than built.
Michal Cimala, the artist behind this sculpture, is a distinctive figure in contemporary Czech art. He studied metal and jewellery at UMPRUM in Prague, under Professor Vratislav Karel Novák – best known as the creator of the Metronome in Letná.Cimala combines technology with a human touch, working with recycled materials and industrial aesthetics. He creates not only sculptures, but also musical instruments – often of very unconventional shapes. Over the past ten years, he has worked with thermoplastics imprinted with the faces of patients undergoing cancer treatment. These materials are used to fix patients in place for precise radiation therapy. They are a fascinating medium—imbued not only with human anatomy but also with the typological features of each patient. The artist is captivated by the material and its dynamism and has long sought ways to strip it of the hospital-associated meanings it inherently carries. He flattens these originally contoured forms into sheets, reassembling them into charged, recharged constellations. In collaboration with David Přikryl, he translated these forms into drawings suitable for laser-cutting in metal. The final sculpture is composed of six metal plates—distilled from this entire process. The sculpture had been in preparation for a year. The artist knew that placing such an object in České Budějovice would bring new energy to the city. It is a kind of frozen, visualized shadow of a ghostly mask removed from a human face—one that could symbolize both life and death. The dichotomy within the object is not immediately readable; understanding the context behind it requires this text or some background knowledge. Yet even without that knowledge, the artist believes the public will form a connection with the piece—just as people do with everything around them. We tend to name natural phenomena, random patterns, puddle stains, and reflections—anything that resembles something else. It’s in our nature. The artist doesn’t know what this sculpture will evoke in viewers. Its name is PERSONA, the Latin word for mask.