Exhibition "Souvenirs" in the "Galerie Pstrossova 23" Praha

The exhibition will present works by Běla Kolářová, Kateřina Černá and Michaela Kukovičová

Galerie Pštrossova 23,

who is only one year old on the cultural scene in Prague, will present Kateřina Černou, Michaela Kukovičová and Běla Kolářová at her third exhibition called Souvenirs, which connects the collage not only as a dominant art technique, but also as a mental creative process: on the principle of mimetic play, generations of fragments of banal everyday life into surprising, poetic correlations that construct idealized subjective reality in the preserve of their ideas and memories.

Kateřina Černá (* 1937) has already established its characteristic style of "simplicity of vision and poetry of simplicity" in the early 1960s. The naive stylization allows her to elegantly balance herself at the edge of sentiment, and devoutly embrace the flow of frivolous associations. The painting connects with beaded beads, pearls, slices of tinsel, or with cuts of fabrics and laces, which have not only a decorative but, above all, symbolic function - similarly to votive pictures which, by force of desire, can re-create ideas in reality. Likewise, the font that Black likes to use does not play the role of just a graphic element, but takes on the role of narrator story - as in a series of "home-made recipe" written on cake mats, or in the latest drawings on paper sachets and official forms, which by its artistic intervention the author beautifully degrades and promotes material destined for destruction of artistic artifacts.

Michaela Kukovičová (* 1968) created unmistakable illustrations for a long line of children's books, in which, as in her free creation, she remains a faithful collage. From the extensive file of ornamental pre-writings of old books, advertisements from the Republican journals, as well as photos from contemporary magazines, he composes hallucinatory scenes in which things "are not what they seem to be". By cutting out various motifs and structures, they dismantle their original bonds and grab them into new bizarre metamorphoses. Her imaginary scenery evokes the disturbing atmosphere of Lynch's Twin Peaks, lonely characters staring in the timeless illusory multi-layered space in turn refer to the paintings of Edward Hooper or Paul Delvaux's lunar vision. In the collection of our latest collages of plywood, we present a carefully crafted album of places that never existed, and a situation that never happened - yet it is believable, like a postcard from the way to the Empire behind the mirror. Like Jindřich Štýrský in the Emilie cycle, he comes to me in a dream, honoring the principles of dream logic, which fragments of perceptions, memories, wishes and fears binds into playful, ambiguous stories.

A series of assemblages Bela Kolářová (1923-2010) borrowed from the collection of Musea Montanelli, expands the Souvenirs exhibition on Civil Sensitivity and Conceptual Approach. The Kolar for years has been without the right to be presented and appreciated, just to be in the drawer. This indulgence gave the note its lush, playful and yet refined visual poetry. In addition to the photographic experiments that have become characteristic of her, she has produced material studies - specimens of shinnaki, staples, patents, ribbons, feminine ornamentations or shards of one blemish. Fragments were systematically sorted into structured diary records or some fetishistic herbarians, in which the remnants of everyday rituals and cohesive objects of events condemned for oblivion are kept in memory. With the archivist's care, these sediments of memories cataloged in the form of private reliquaries, and the moments of their past, with this gesture, built up unpretentious intimate memorials.

The work of Bela Kolarova remained long hidden in the shadow of her husband George. Her work, however, has gained general recognition, her works have been included in significant domestic and world collections, and Kolářová became an equal partner of such personalities as Juan Miro, Man Ray, Vasilij Kandinsky and Geraldo de Barros - as evidenced by the current Shape of Lights in London's Tate Modern. As well as her inconspicuousness, Souvenirs of Catherine of Black and Michaela Kukovic have a strong potential to become another exciting proof of the proliferation of Czech artistry into the highest levels of the world's art scene.

Terezie Zemánková, curator

(Google translation)

***