ISLANDS
solo show
November 27th, 2019 – February 1st, 2020
Kurátor / Curator: Lucia Miklošková
In collaboration with SODA gallery
Photo Adam Šakový
Courtesy of SODA gallery
Liptovská galéria Petra Michala Bohúňa / The Peter Michal Bohúň Gallery in Liptov
LUCIA TALLOVÁ
OSTROVY / ISLANDS
27. november 2019 – 1. február 2020 / November 27th, 2019 – February 1st, 2020
Kurátor / Curator: Lucia Miklošková
In collaboration with SODA gallery
Photo: Adam Šakový
The exhibition represents the artworks of Lucia Tallova assembled into a whole of a space installation. The boundaries between the artefacts do not matter, because one artwork finishes the other and together, they create a poetically congenial statement.
In her installations and three-dimensional collages, Lucia Tallova works with old photographs and second-hand furniture. The photograph is complemented by sensitive interventions, such as adding a paint spot, another image or object, in various manipulated forms (crumpled, scrolled, torn, etc.). At other times, she proceeds in the opposite direction and selects a detail from the image that she isolates. With these authorial gestures, Tallova violates and overwrites the subject of the photographic record, which results in an awakening of the photographic medium and a revival of the image (of the time past) in the present space.
The current exhibition follows the previous exhibition projects in which the author emphasized the exterior of the works. She first thematized her works through the construction of the archive (construction of the artwork as an archive of memories), then she arrived at more relaxed forms, where she did not necessarily limit her works with a frame and moved to open compositions of some kind of internal(ized) visual landscapes. These landscapes are neither real nor unreal, nor are they more mental than physical, i.e. truly present "here".
Tallova's work is characterized by two pictorial motifs: sea landscape and airy atmosphere. The author keeps returning to sea levels and water shores, or steam, air, and clouds. She returns to them not only on the subject level of photographic records but also in her paintings. Paintings, large-sized canvases, and small watercolours on paper seem to capture movement as a form of a cycle of constancy - water that changes into water vapour; crystallizes and then returns to its original state. This transformation, which is the cypher of motion (but the motion from the perspective of time!), happens also when the images of water vapour vanish before our eyes and disappear into an abstract painting, which is perhaps an even truer portrait of its subject.
Lucia Tallova constructs her objects as islands or mountains. In both cases, it is a symbolic place that is inaccessible and distant. That is why Tallova's landscapes are mostly empty. In these absent distant landscapes, there is only a void and time and duration. The movement we mentioned earlier is not a movement of action, but on the contrary, a movement subjected to time, an exchange between real and imaginary, figurative and abstract, subjective and objective, physical and mental, actual and virtual (near and distant, present and absent, past). More clearly, Lucia Tallova's works present the physical objects known from our everyday reality, introduced into unusual encounters and connections, when they become rather a picture-memory or a picture-dream. After all, when we remember or dream, we are not in the past but rather in both times at once, since both times double and mingle, creating a new reality - an image-island.
If we were searching for the name for this time, it could be ‘every day’. The author conceives natural images as forms unifying everyday life into the form of eternity and unchanging order. At the same time, everydayness has two contradictory forms in Tallova's works - sometimes it is an unbearable burden, other times it is an expression of contemplative beauty.
Lucia Tallová (*1985) is a well-established author of the young generation on the Slovak scene, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts, Ivan Csudai Studio. Winner of several important awards (2016 - Tatra Banka Foundation Art Award, 2013 - VUB Painting of the Year, 2010 - Strabag Art award International).