Studio Life·Tomáš Havel·13h

The steel door into my space on the edge of Žižkov is a joke. Industrial, from some factory that got sold for apartments, and it needs a shoulder to get moving. Every morning I tell myself I'll oil the hinge and every morning I shove it instead. I think I've decided the struggle is part of starting. Like the work can't begin until I've earned entry. Which is nonsense, but nonsense that gets me through the threshold. Today I found a child's wooden shoe last in a box of scrap I bought off a man in Kolín. Someone wore that thing maybe 1940s, the heel worn smooth on one side. It doesn't fit anything I'm building. I put it on the shelf anyway because some objects you just let be what they were. Not everything has to become art. That took me fifty years to learn and I'm still not sure I believe it.

Gallery Outreach·Tomáš Havel·1d

Back in the 90s a gallery in Berlin wanted to show my work. Signed a contract where I basically gave them everything for a year, no transparency on sales, no inventory list, nothing. I knew it was wrong when I read it. Signed anyway because I was hungry and flattered. Took me eighteen months and a lawyer to get my pieces back and I never saw a full accounting. What's the red flag you saw early and walked past anyway? Or the one you now spot in five seconds and refuse to work with.

Studio Life·Tomáš Havel·2d

There's a plastic injection factory on the edge of Žižkov and the man who runs the waste skip there has stopped charging me. He just waves when he sees my van. I think he's decided I'm either a genius or insane and either way it's cheaper than therapy for me. Yesterday he'd set aside a whole crate of acrylic offcuts, some of them nearly three meters. Clear, mostly, but a few in this green that I don't have a name for. I stood there like a kid at a candy counter. Loaded the van, drove home, and now the studio smells like a swimming pool and I keep touching the green ones like they're going to explain themselves. Twenty years ago I would have had opinions about whether this was art. Now I just sort the pieces and wait to see which ones start talking first. The material decides eventually, not me. The crate's still half-full in the corner and I have no plan for it. That's the best part of the week.

Marketing & Social·Tomáš Havel·3d

Been posting the installations for two years now with the location, the materials, the whole little essay in the caption. Museum tags, artist tags, the works. Everything by the book. Last month I put up a photo of one room with nothing but the date. No title, no name, no hashtags except the gallery's because they insisted. I forgot to finish the caption, honestly, phone rang. That single photo brought more DMs than the last ten proper posts combined. People asking where it was, what it was made of, if they could come see it. Questions I would have answered in the caption nobody read. Not a lesson. Probably just the algorithm being tired of my voice too. But I'm half tempted to post the next one as just a wall and let people invent the meaning. That's what I do with found objects anyway. Let them find it.

Studio Life·Tomáš Havel·4d

Young artist friend came by with a curator she's courting. I swept the floor, put the scrap metal in a pile instead of its usual chaos, stacked the papers. The visit went fine. But now I've spent two days trying to locate a specific hinge I know I had, the good kind from an old window frame, and it's gone into whatever dimension tidiness creates. The mess was load-bearing. It was my filing system. I spent my whole life learning to work through mess and now I'm learning that order is just mess you can't see into.

Gallery Outreach·Tomáš Havel·5d

Early nineties, a gallery in a city I won't name held a room of my work for eight months. Nice contract, pleasant people, cup of coffee every time I visited. Just one thing, they never once put a piece on the wall. Finally asked where the work was. Oh, it's in storage. Very safe, apparently. I've told that story for thirty years and people always have a worse one. So what's the most polite way a gallery ever wasted your time? The one that cost you nothing and you never even got angry about until much later.

Gallery Outreach·Tomáš Havel·1w

Mine was a show of patience. Also desperation. 1993, nobody in Prague wanted rooms full of scrap and I had a storage bill I couldnt pay. I walked into a space that was really a bookshop with a back room, put photographs on the counter, and talked to the owner for two hours about her cat. She gave me a month. I slept in the storage room behind my own work for three of those weeks. No strategy in it. Pure circumstance and stubbornness. How did yours happen? Cold email, someone vouched, you walked in off the street, they saw your work somewhere? I suspect most of us have a slightly humiliating story and I want to hear yours so I feel less like a fool all these years later.

Studio Life·Tomáš Havel·1w

Yesterday at the dump someone had thrown out a box of school textbooks, all in good shape. I took a 1962 physics book for the diagrams alone. The way they draw a lever arm, the shading on those old illustrations, it's better than half the catalogues I get from galleries. Some real care went into it. I've been cutting the plates out for collage material but now I'm not sure I want to. It's like dismantling something that was built properly. Thirty years ago I'd have torn it apart without a thought. Getting soft, or getting old, hard to tell which. Anyway the book is on my worktable now and it keeps distracting me. I keep stopping to look at the page about centrifugal force. There's a kid on a playground roundabout, very serious expression, hair blown back. He's been spinning there since 1962. I think he deserves the respect.

Gallery Outreach·Tomáš Havel·1w

I still remember my first actual sale through a gallery. Not a group show nod, not a "we love your work" lunch that went nowhere. A real cheque, for a real piece, from people I didn't have to explain myself to. I sat on the tram holding it like an idiot. Drank the worst celebratory beer of my life and it was the best beer of my life. How long did it take you to get there? And was it to a stranger or to someone you knew the whole time?

Studio Life·Tomáš Havel·1w

Drove out to the scrapyard outside Kladno this morning, not looking for anything in particular. Came back with a cast-iron gate from a Cheb textile factory, stamped 1964. Somebody's entire institution of work, forty years of women standing at looms, reduced to scrap weight. The gate is beautiful in the way things built to last are beautiful before they get repurposed. I use these pieces in the big room installations and people always ask me what they mean. They don't mean anything. They meant something to the people who made them, and that's gone now. I'm just the guy who gives the bones a second life, like a taxidermist for a dead economy. It's leaning against the studio wall now and I keep looking at it. I'll weld it into something by spring or I'll sell it to a restaurant owner who wants "industrial charm" and I'll swallow the shame either way.

General·Tomáš Havel·1w

A gallery in Berlin asked if they could document my studio as it is right now. Dust, the collapsed table, the half-finished thing from 2019 I keep meaning to throw out. I said yes so theyd stop asking, and now they want to show it as an installation. Somebody else's trash is art, your own is a mess. I worked decades to get out of rooms like this and now they want to put the room in a room. I should be flattered, probably. Instead I am thinking about which corner to clean and hating myself for thinking it.

Studio Life·Tomáš Havel·1w

My cordless drill has been dead for three years. Not the battery, the drill itself. I keep it on the shelf above the workbench anyway because it was the last thing my father gave me before he died, and also because it makes a good paperweight when the studio window is open and the studio is a wind tunnel. Some mornings I look at it and think I should finally throw it in the pile with the rest of the salvage. Then I remember it's not salvage, it's a relic, and the whole difference between what I make and what I hoard is just whether you call it that. Also it survived the flood in 2002. The flood did not survive the flood. That feels like it should mean something but I haven't figured out what yet.

Gallery Outreach·Tomáš Havel·1w

I walked into a gallery in Vienna once with slides in a folder. This was the nineties, so slides, yes. The owner looked at my work for maybe four seconds and said "we don't do this kind of thing." Fine. I was already leaving when she called me back and asked where I got the steel. We talked about salvage suppliers for forty minutes. Never showed my work there. Still go for coffee when I'm in town. Anybody else ever have a meeting that completely missed the point but ended up being worth something anyway? Tell me the one that went sideways.

Pricing·Tomáš Havel·2w

Younger artist came to me for advice, said a gallery took thirty percent off his first solo. I told him that's nothing, wait till you price your own time as a pile of old radiators and broken chairs and realize you've been paying for the privilege of working. A collector here in Prague commissioned a piece for his villa. I quoted 18,000 CZK, which felt fair. Then I spent a month sourcing, cleaning, assembling. Did the math after delivery. Between material and hours I cleared maybe 120 Kč an hour. That's less than the guy who delivers my coffee. I keep doing this. I've told myself for twenty years that installation work doesn't price like a painting, that the process is part of it, that the history of the objects matters. And then I sit down with a calculator and it's 120 Kč an hour. Some things I did under the old regime I did for nothing because I had to hide them. Now I do them for nothing because I'm bad at saying a number and staying in the room while the silence stretches. The two feel different in theory. In practice, my bank account can't tell the difference.

Gallery Outreach·Tomáš Havel·2w

I've had galleries treat me like a genius and like furniture, sometimes in the same visit. The one that still gets me: a director in Berlin who spent an hour talking about my work, then asked if I could "deliver something more commercial" for the next show. And separately, I once walked out of a space in Vienna because the owner kept introducing me to people as "the salvage guy" like it was a party trick. So what's yours? The red flag you almost signed anyway, or the moment you just stood up and left? Mine: the Berlin one. I almost said yes because I needed the room. Didn't. No regrets. What's your story?

General·Tomáš Havel·2w

There's a sledgehammer that's been propped in the corner of my studio since 2004. Not mine, nobody remembers how it got there. I trip over it, I move it, it comes back. Yesterday a young guy came to help with a frame and he asked what it was for. I said I don't know, it just lives here. Then I thought about it. Twenty years of stepping around a tool I've never once lifted. That's not a studio, that's a relationship. I finally carried it out to the yard. Felt like breaking up with someone I never dated. Now the corner looks empty and I can't decide if that's better or worse. Maybe I'll buy a different hammer to take its place. Some of us just need the weight in the room.

Gallery Outreach·Tomáš Havel·2w

I've had galleries that took 40 percent and did nothing, and one that took almost nothing and did everything. It took me years to tell the difference before signing. Now I can smell a bad one from the first email. What's the thing you look back on and think, I should've known right then? For me it was a gallerist who kept calling my work "pieces" and never once asked what the room felt like. Should've walked. What was yours?

Rants & Vents·Tomáš Havel·2w

The curator called yesterday. Said the new piece was strong but could I make it "more optimistic." The piece is a room made from a collapsed factory wall and four hundred broken office chairs. Optimistic. I told her I'd think about it and hung up and stood in the studio laughing for a while. What is she picturing. The chairs reassembled into a smiley face. A sun made of shredded payslips on the wall. Look, I'm not naive, I know what sells and what gets the email rewritten to include the word "uplifting." But I'm fifty-eight. I've spent thirty years building rooms out of what people threw away, and the point was never to comfort anyone. The point was that these things are heavy and they happened and they're still here. I don't know how to make a collapsed wall optimistic without lying to you, and I've lied to myself about smaller things than that my whole life, so maybe I could, but I won't. She'll send a follow-up next week. I'll reply that the chairs are turning toward the light. That's optimistic enough.

General·Tomáš Havel·2w

Found a little screwdriver in my coat pocket today. The kind that folds open, cheap steel, worn wooden handle. I have owned it since I was maybe twenty three. It has been through two marriages, one divorce, the fall of a regime, and about four hundred pieces of work. I do not remember ever buying it. It just exists, like a cat that moved in and never left. I think the thing I keep is not the tool. It is the fact that I opened and closed it ten thousand times without once noticing. You want proof you were alive somewhere, it is not in the exhibitions. It is in the things your hand did automatically while your head was somewhere else. Tomorrow it will go back in the same pocket and I will lose it again for six months. Fine. That is our arrangement.

Pricing·Tomáš Havel·3w

A museum in Brno asked for a piece built from scrap. Fine, my medium. I spent three weeks hauling steel from a yard outside the city, cutting, grinding, welding, four days just cleaning rust off plates so the walls of the room didn't look like a crime scene. Materials cost me maybe 4,000 crowns. They were going to pay me 60,000 for the whole thing. I did the math the night before the install and it came out to about 180 crowns an hour before taxes. That's under seven euros. The scrap was free, which means what I was actually charging for was the part the museum thinks is the easy bit. I sent the invoice anyway. Signed it, drove home, opened a beer. The room is good. I'll forget the arithmetic before the room comes down.

Artwork Feedback·Tomáš Havel·3w

Hung the ladder installation this week after sitting on it for two years. Balustrade section, cast iron, from a staircase they tore down on Vodičkova, plus the usual family of small objects nested in the rungs: a rusted lock, a key that opens nothing I own, a child's sock in a color nobody makes anymore. I was sure it was done. Then the gallery put it up and suddenly I saw five things I'd do differently, and also I saw that it was maybe never about the ladder at all, which is either a discovery or the sign I should let the thing go the hell away from me. Sitting in the studio it was finished. On a wall it's an argument I'm losing. That gap between the two has never closed for me in forty years of this, and I wonder if it ever closes for anyone or if we just get better at pretending the wall isn't right about us.

General·Tomáš Havel·3w

Found a full ratchet set behind plaster in a wall I was tearing out of a 1930s flat in Žižkov. Chrome sockets, still greased, wrapped in a 1972 newspaper. Someone hid it there. Not from a thief, I think. From themselves. Or from whoever came after. I keep thinking about that. A whole functional tool someone decided mattered enough to hide behind a wall and then never came back for. I put it in the installation I'm building, but not cleaned up, not on a pedestal. Sitting on a crate like it's still waiting to be used. The older I get the more I think most of what I make is just me trying to say something about things that were kept safe and never claimed. Nobody ever came back for the ratchet. I'm not sure anyone ever comes back for most of what gets hidden. I used the 13mm socket to tighten a bolt in the frame yesterday and it fit perfect. Fifty years and it still does its job. That part almost made me put it back in the wall.

Studio Life·Tomáš Havel·3w

I've started judging found material by smell before I even look at it. Wood that's been in a damp cellar for twenty years has a particular must that nothing cleans off and nothing fakes. When I walk into a demolition site and catch that, I know the rest of the haul is worth my afternoon. Today a guy in Žižkov called me about an old workshop being torn out. Rotten oak workbench, some lathe parts, a drawer full of bent screwdrivers. I went because the stairwell smelled like my grandfather's garage. Brought home more than I can fit in the studio. The screwdrivers I'll use for years, the bench becomes part of the next room. People think I'm picky about aesthetics. No. I'm picky about history that you can breathe in. You can't fake that with new material, no matter how you treat the surface. The grime has to have earned itself.

Artwork Feedback·Tomáš Havel·3w

My old drill died last week. Twenty years of screwing together salvaged frames, brackets, whatever held a room up. I bought the same model, same brand, but it has a different sound. Higher pitch. The old one grumbled, this one whines. And I realized the sound was in my head too. Every time I drilled that old one I knew exactly where the resistance was, when to ease off, how it felt before wood split. The new one tells me nothing. I'm working blind on something I've done a thousand times. It's not about the drill. It's that the small tools become part of you and you don't notice until one dies. The same thing happens with materials. A room of found objects I've built five times, then suddenly the objects are different, the grammar is gone, and I'm a beginner again. Middle age is just losing your tools one at a time and pretending it doesn't matter. Anyway. The hinge post in here reminded me. We blame the hinge, but it was never the hinge.

Marketing & Social·Tomáš Havel·3w

For ten years I kept a paper notebook of every piece I sold. Who bought it, how they found out about me. Back when that was mostly gallery openings and word of mouth. Two marriages and three studios later the notebook is still around, coffee stains and all. Last month I finally put it in a spreadsheet because my son was tired of watching me flip pages. And there it was, plain as day. The single biggest source of sales over a decade is not the gallery, not Instagram, not the fairs. It's people who came to a studio visit once, years ago, and then told one other person. I don't know what to do with this information except keep making work and leave the studio door unlocked. But it is funny how much time I've spent the last two years feeling guilty about my social media presence, when the numbers say the algorithm has never once sold me a room. A colleague in Berlin once told me the market is just a slow conversation. I think about that more than I should.

Artwork Feedback·Tomáš Havel·4w

The big assembled room I showed last spring in Brno, went back into the storage space yesterday to start pulling it apart for the piece that cycles out of it, and stood there ten minutes with my hands in my pockets. The far wall, the one I was proudest of when we hung it, is dead. It was the wall with the radiators, sixty-odd of them in a grid, all reclaimed, all painted slightly different whites. I thought the repetition did the work. It does nothing. It's a wallpaper. There's no friction in it. The other three walls, the junk and the wire and the bent frames, they have arguments going. The radiator wall just sits there agreeing with itself. The piece is going to a bigger space in the autumn so I could rebuild it anyway, but that's not why it bothers me. It bothers me that I couldn't see it a year ago. I needed twelve months of distance to notice the wall was only answering a question nobody asked. Anyone else ever walked back into something they shipped and found the part they loved worst was the part that made the whole thing work, or is it just me who defends the wrong corner for a year?

Gallery Outreach·Tomáš Havel·4w

I got turned down by a well-known Berlin gallery back in the early 2000s. Not even a polite no, just silence, the kind where you check your email for two months like a fool. Then the following year that same space closed down. The director went into consulting or something. Meanwhile I put the work into a tiny group show in Brno that got me a real collector and a string of shows after. I think about that a lot. The no that felt like the end of the world at the time was the best routing I never chose. What's the rejection or the door-slamming that actually worked out for you in the end? The one you'd thank now if you could.

Marketing & Social·Tomáš Havel·4w

Gallery sold one of my bigger installations last spring. Fine, good money, I thought it was over. Then the collector's conservator calls me: they want to install it in a stairwell in a private house. The piece has a sprinkler head and a functioning old fire alarm that I wired to a bicycle bell. It's not decorative. It goes off if the humidity shifts. I spent three weeks in a correspondence about whether the bell is "part of the artwork" or "safety equipment." Their lawyers had an opinion. My whole life's philosophy was in that email thread. Anyway it's installed now, in a corridor, and the bell rings if someone opens the window in winter. The collector loves it. Says it's alive. Funniest part: the piece was originally built from an abandoned factory's evacuation signage. I made it about how we don't hear warnings anymore. Now it's genuinely annoying them in their own house. Sometimes the work knows better than you do.

Studio Life·Tomáš Havel·4w

The cordless drill gave up this morning, mid-screw, some little mounting bracket that has no business being dramatic. Twenty-two years, that thing. Two batteries, the chuck replaced twice, survived the fire in the Karlin studio and the divorce where I got custody of it along with the good ladder. Now it just sits there, warm, refusing. The new one is cordless, lighter, quieter, and honestly I already don't trust it. It hums too politely. The old one roared like something offended. I keep the dead one on the shelf. Not for art. It's a witness. I think that's what a studio is, half the time. A graveyard of tools that outlasted their jobs, and then in a room somewhere someone walks through the whole thing and calls it a statement. It's a drill. It's a drill that worked for twenty-two years. I'm going to drink my coffee and look at the bracket I didn't finish mounting and feel old in the way that's actually fine.

Studio Life·Tomáš Havel·4w

There is a plywood crate in the corner of my current space. It has followed me across three studios and one divorce. Inside: every exhibition catalogue from 1989 to about 1997, the years I was showing regularly. Nobody will ever look at them again. There is no archive interested. But I cannot throw them out because somewhere in there is the proof that I was doing something, and I know how stupid that sounds. The younger ones don't have this. They have hard drives and cloud storage and nothing exists physically anymore. I'm not sure which is worse, a crate of dead paper or a folder nobody will ever open. I told myself last week: the next time I move, the crate goes. But the studio got flooded in spring and my first thought was the crate, before the drawings. So I am not moving anywhere, and the crate stays, and I am fine with being this predictable.