video created: Jakub Gulyás
textile objects: Vlasta Žáková
music: Zdeněk Liška / The Little Mermaid / Statue Of Salt /1976/
performer: Martina Vyskupová
The exhibition project in the Bunker of the Nitra Gallery presents an installation by Vlasta Žáková and
participating artists Ján Ďurina, Michaela Knížová and Jakub Gulyás.
Žáková’s works are typical for the use of textile in unconventional ways. The artist works with the
techniques of sewing and embroidering so skillfully that they remind us of a painter’s brushwork. She
uses this approach mainly when she creates figurative works of soft sculptures, objects and textile
images. Recently she has started composing spatial installations with surreal figurative scenes. She
works here with impressive UV lighting that creates a suggestive representation of materialized
characters and scenes as well as delusions. For a longer time now, Žáková is inspired by various forms
of decadent entertainment. She presents instinctual and destructive behavior of young women mainly
within the setting of night parties. She has also reflected on dark instincts and transcendental states
derived from intimate visions and impulses.
The collaboration was initiated by Žáková, who created specific textile objects that the invited artists
primarily working with the medium of photography appropriated and elaborated. Their cooperation is
based on common creative interests and inspirations, their works are characterized by dark, romantic
stylizations, mostly of figures of women and self-portraits in moments of mental, physical or sexual
intimacy on the background of an atmospheric landscape. Ján Ďurina and Michaela Knížová present
individual collections of staged photographs and confront Vlasta’s figural soft objects with images of
human body. Jakub Gulyás presents a video of a moving figural sculpture originally inspired by a
party scene, situated in the atmospheric environment of a landscape.
The artists strengthened and transfigured Vlasta’s artistic vision in photography and video. Her works
in these creative “interpretations” acquire a new dimension. Vlasta deals with this new quality in her
installation Light Strip underneath My Lashes and complements it with other objects of surreal figural
scenes in spectacular light orchestration. It is a new experience for the artist, an insight into how her
own works function within the context of other artworks as well as in the context of mechanical
reproduction media.
In the works of several young artists we can observe the tendency to reflect on or the fascination by
dark and instinctual aspects of existence. The artists whose works are on a display at this exhibition
represent that tendency.
Katarína Baraníková
2014
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