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16. 11. 2011 – 21. 1. 2012Pavel Švec
Jiří Švestka Gallery, Prague
Jiri Svestka Gallery completes this year`s exhibition programme by some of new works by Katerina Vincourova, one of the most significant artists of her generation who is coming back to the domestic stage after a six-year pause. Katerina Vincourova was born in 1968, Prague. After a long pause, the laureate of Jindrich Chalupecky Award in 1997 follows on her previous creation well-known for its playful and critical conception of promotional subjects, interpreted as generously dimensioned portraits of aesthetic balast.
Air-filled objects, pieces often difficult not only for space and production technology, are now replaced by installations, whose subtlety and stricking reduction of the means resemble more linear drawings, tight, balancing or freely hanged in the space.
In contrast to the ambitious projects known from the earlier period, Vincourova uses for her new implementation means and materials, that reference (by their original purpose, colours and structure) rather than to the spiritual poverty of the world`s consumer society into the realm of personal, intimate and physically-emotional life. Things that can be very familiar to us by their banality she puts together with a kind of surrealist latitude to create the new, dynamic and often surprising context and thus makes spectator actively join his/her experience and imagination.
Even if it is obvious that the author still devotes space to intuitive, free layering of imagination, occasional and random quotes of classic modern and postmodern art do not let us hesitate that we are confronted with the work of mature and confident artist, who was able to create her own and unique expression index in a tangle of different tendencies of contemporary art, while maintaining traditional arts knowledge. After the break required by her motherhood, the works by Katerina Vincourova give us finer, more realistic and more concentrated impression. Yet, there is something suprisingly radical in them from the perspective of contemporary art.
Pavel Švec
