The concept of the historically focused collection exhibition How to Collect Art: the Karel Tutsch Story will be expanded by a series of exhibitions of the youngest generation of artists, current students or graduates from art school studios. In this way, the curators will revive Tutsch's basic strategy of discovering and presenting the works of previously unknown artists in a new context. Gallery Na bidýlku II will thus become a laboratory for new approaches to the traditional medium of painting and installation, whose transformations Tutsch has followed and supported for several decades.
Over the past decade, there has been a noticeable return of the figure in painting, associated with the search for a new formal language by which to reimagine what it means to be a human being. This development involves the seemingly paradoxical strategy of discovering a lost reality with the help of fictional narratives, for the retreat from real life into imaginary worlds (primarily virtual and media-based) is a burning issue for all generations, not just the younger ones.
One prominent representative of this tendency in contemporary painting is Gabriela Slaninková (born 1993), who studied drawing under Jiří Petrbok at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Her work impresses the viewer with its harmonious use of colours, mastery of technique and dynamic style, thanks to which she succeeds in capturing the flow of time on the canvas. The paintings’ shared identity stems in part from their figural elements, but also from their settings and from the objects that repeatedly appear in them. Beginning with an earlier series of portraits, the artist has moved on to monumental figure paintings depicting seemingly banal scenes, which she further explores in a series of smaller paintings – “enlarged” close-ups of the original paintings, though with an altered composition.
Besides the depicted figures and their mutual interactions, Slaninková mainly focuses on offering a glimpse into her inner world through facial expressions or fleeting gestures. Each minor detail on the canvas contributes to shaping the final impression, to defining its particular situation. Depictions of movement, of the current moment and its continuation appear only in later works, most commonly in the form of a hand in motion. In fact, the motif of the hand runs through all of Slaninková’s work, where it takes on multiple roles depending on the overall context: the hand as a symbol of protection, of touch, but also of CONNECTION or as a negative symbol of power.
Another recurring object is the mobile telephone, thanks to which the depicted figure can maintains all forms of CONNECTION – physical, emotional, mental. Another frequent motif is that of friends meeting, although Slaninková’s paintings exclusively depict female figures. Regardless of their changing faces, they are the artist’s alter ego, placed into various ordinary and familiar settings: resting in bed, sitting at a table in the company of others, or strolling through the woods or by a pond. All of Slaninková’s works, however, are infused with the vague sense of melancholy of a generation discovering two worlds, neither of which offers the necessary stability.
The intuitive interpretation of motifs represents the artist’s inner reaction to events and an attempt at depicting objects of everyday use, but also the need to understand how things work. All these aspects of her art are most commonly expressed through a jumble of loosely interconnected motifs that communicate with each other semantically and through associations. Such interconnectedness can also be found between the individual works in a series and within Slaninková’s entire body of work to date. She is interested in the many pos-sible ways of reading things, not just in the painting itself but also by metaphorically illustrating the situation in the image through the titles of her works. Similarly, she likes to make use of double meanings.
Most recently, Gabriela Slaninková has revisited the use of textile in art, a material that she worked with while studying fashion design but moved away from while a student at Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts, where she focused mainly on mastering classical painting techniques and had no room for experimentation. She is particularly drawn to materials such as denim, netting and plush, which she not only uses to dress the figures in her paintings but also experiments with as a replacement for canvas – for the painting’s support itself. In this way, her fascination with the motif of tables and draperies – a dominant feature in her paintings of reclining figures or people seated at a table – moves from two to three dimensions.
