Exhibition Two

Authors: Vladimír Houdek, Juraj Kollár, Štefan Papčo
Curator: Silvia Van Espen
22 June – 11 August 2012

Exhibition Two, the second in the succession of collective exhibitions, presents the authors who ZAHORIAN&co GALLERY has established cooperation with. This time it introduces the youngest of them.

Vladimír Houdek (born 1984) established himself markedly on the Czech artistic scene already during his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, which can be exemplified by many solo and collective exhibitions as well as by his award of Laureate at Mladá malba 2012 (Young Painting). His creation is based on various themes: from mythical relations of a human and an animal to the elements being geometricized and abstracted; as for the figuration, he focuses on the characters from literature, film, or photographs. This exhibition presents the samples from his latest series entitled Dauhaus, set in the tones and shades of grey, blue and black modelling geometrically abstracted and stylized scenes. Dominant elements, a circle and a triangle, serve as universal forms which the artist divides, covers and completes with other geometric forms.

Juraj Kollár (1981) is specific thanks to his dense colour expression exploring a classical oil painting. What makes his views familiar to us are his landscapes (Bunding, 2012, Petržalka 2012), different corners, backyards and streets of towns (Ventúrska, 2011, Fountain St.Michel, 2011), or situations chosen randomly or non-traditionally in the urban space, such as looks into the entrances of buildings, figures accidentally on the scene (Cooks, 2011). A particular group within his works is that of formal jigsaws of shiny and transparent surfaces made of glass concrete, in which he finds deformed pictures of reality in their background. A picture called A Plate (2011), present at the exhibition, is created in this special way. A white shape of china plate with its spiral painting transformed into the raster, consequently modified in individual parts of the jigsaw, is enhanced by the intense black background.

Štefan Papčo (1983) enriches his creation of sculptures with non-traditional themes, too. It is especially climbing – his hobby – which serves as a source of inspiration; the resulting impressions, experiences and special perception of the landscape and a human being in this rough environment are transformed into an artistic intention to explore the landscape “as having the potential to describe the long-term development of a certain society bound to a concrete place“. The author explores and further works with phenomena and changes in the landscape which enable him to decipher the message about the spirit of a particular period of time. He is especially interested in extreme situations in which one goes up to the limits, faced by the community of climbers during their passage through the mountainous terrain.

Besides other works, the artist presents Arena Reload (2009), a work conceived as a fictional space based on generating key passages from climbers´ tracks. The conception is subordinated to the choice of passages while the criterion is neither the difficulty of the track, nor the aesthetics of the landscape: it is the pseudo-poetics of the chosen tracks´ names. This work is composed of 3D models made via special techniques of recording. The resulting space is in fact fictional closed space of an artificial climbing wall of the walls. Therefore, the interest in the space as such has changed into reflections about the possibilities of movement of the space itself.