The final presentation of A Lover’s Discourse
features two new paintings by artist Stanislava
Kovalcikova (b. 1988, Czechoslovakia) that she has
chosen to present alongside a 1971 film by
legendary video and performance artist VALIE
EXPORT (b. 1940, Austria).
Following her studies
at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under the
mentorship of Peter Doig and Tomma Abts,
Kovalcikova recently initiated The White Ermine,
an independent project space for contemporary
art, alongside her Düsseldorf-based studio practice.
Experimentation in exhibition-making and the
vocabulary of display are an important part of
Kovalcikova’s approach to painting: for her solo
exhibition at Belvedere Museum in Vienna (2023),
the artist displayed her works within a dimly lit,
monochromatic atmosphere in tones of ochre,
while for her solo presentation at Art Basel (also
2023), she transformed the art fair booth into the
architectural environment of a waiting room,
hanging her paintings inside medical cabinets.
For her show at the Aspen Art Museum,
Kovalcikova approaches the gallery as a cave-like
environment in which the projection of VALIE
EXPORT’s black-and-white film Facing a Family
provides the sole source of light. Kovalcikova’s
paintings are illuminated by this glow. EXPORT’s
groundbreaking short piece represents an early
example of interventions by artists into mainstream
European television and shows a bourgeois
Austrian family watching TV together while eating
dinner. Originally broadcast on Austrian network
television in February 1971, Facing a Family was
seen by middle-class families much like the one in
the artwork itself, thereby mirroring their
experience and complicating the relationship
between subject, viewer, and screen. Similarly,
Kovalcikova’s uncanny figures emerge from a
world embedded within our world. Her two
paintings Silence and Borders (2023) and Train
of Thought (2024) unravel in a psychological
dimension that feels at once familiar and rejected,
desirable yet unspeakable.
Eating as a bonding and synchronizing—even
ritualistic—experience among a group of
individuals underpins the dynamic of the family
portrait in EXPORT’s film. In turn, in Kovalcikova’s
cosmos we become intimate with a carnal
consumption of reality by way of painting: her
images cannibalize knowledge in order to retain it.
The figures in Silence and Borders—which
Kovalcikova started to paint in 2009—are inspired
by the artist’s intimate friendships at the time, and
continue to echo that closeness. Shadows and
shading are deployed on the canvas to conjure a
space in which the legibility of the characters’
postures and moods is resilient even when
mutable. Placed in conversation for the first time
in the context of A Lover’s Discourse, Kovalcikova
and EXPORT share an interest in confronting and
understanding the boundaries of provocation and
belonging through the empirical manifestation of
their works.
Stanislava Kovalcikova’s presentation is accompanied by a newly commissioned essay by Travis Jeppsen.
Stanislava Kovalcikova was born in
Czechoslovakia in 1988 and lives and works
in Düsseldorf.
Recent solo exhibitions
include First Rays of the New Sun, Antenna
Space, Shanghai (2023); Grotto, Belvedere
21. Museum of Contemporary Art, Vienna
(2022); am I dead yet, Peres Projects, Berlin
(2022); Duftmarken oder die Unfähigkeit sich
mitzuteilen, sonneundsolche, Düsseldorf
(2022); Imaga, 15orient, New York (2021);
Eastern Promises, Open Forum, Berlin
(2020); Cautionary Tales, MAMOTH, London
(2020); and Turn on Inside, Ten Haaf Projects,
Amsterdam (2019), among others.
Selected
group exhibitions include Cadavre Exquis
or the Voluptuous Decay of the Shivering
Veril, curated by Stanislava Kovalcikova,
BRAUNSFELDER, Cologne (2023); Horizons:
Is there anybody out there?, curated by Robin
Peckham, Antenna Space, Shanghai (2023);
Hardcore, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2023);
Landschaft, Galerie Khoshbakht, Cologne
(2023); Interior, curated by Andrew Bonacina,
Michael Werner Gallery, London (2022); Dark
Light: Realism in the Age of Post-Truths,
Aïshti Foundation, Beirut (2022); Do Nothing,
Feel Everything, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna
(2021); Queer Queer Kasimir, Saska Kepa
Salon, Warsaw (2020); If on a Winter’s Night
a Traveller, MAMOTH, London (2020); On the
Politics of Delicacy, Capitain Petzel, Berlin
(2020); Gubbinal, Project Native Informant,
London (2019); and Paint, also known as
Blood, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw
(2019)
Hours |
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 AM–6 PM
Closed Mondays
|
General operating support is provided by Colorado Creative Industries. CCI and its activities are made possible through an annual appropriation from the Colorado General Assembly and federal funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.
General operating support is provided by Colorado Creative Industries. CCI and its activities are made possible through an annual appropriation from the Colorado General Assembly and federal funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.