2024-09-16 03:39:16
The Gallery of Fine Arts in Ostrava opened the autumn season with exhibitions of the works of two conceptual artists, Slovak Marek Kvetan and local native Dagmar Lasotová.
Forty-eight-year-old Marek Kvetan belongs to the generation of artists who came forward around the turn of the millennium. Works with new media, digital image or video post-production. Czechs got to know his work in 2008, when he received the NG 333 Prize awarded by the National Gallery. At that time, he interwoven the industrially produced Persian with colored diodes and supplemented the light installation with musical accompaniment. Two years later he exhibited in the Gallery of the Capital City of Prague.
His current project in Ostrava includes a series of objects created according to a digital model. According to gallery spokesperson Jana Malášek Šrubařová, the author is based on post-conceptual approaches and analysis. “In the sculpting process, he incorporates current technologies, for example digitization or CT scans,” he mentions.
For example, this year’s object called Touch of Creation was created in this way. It shows an enlarged skeleton of Kvetan’s arm with an extended finger. It is completed with a gearbox and a plinth as if from ancient art. The work deliberately quotes a well-known gesture from Michelangelo’s painting The Creation of Adam.
Another work called Vessels of Temporality consists of several oversized vases whose baroque shapes the artist modified using computer so-called generative programs. “They refer to post-colonial styles and metallic car paint, for example, and to the superficiality of our consumer culture,” says curator Vladimír Beskid. The exhibition, which will last until November 10, is complemented by plaster containers of various shapes and sizes. They were created as castings of real containers, PET bottles, milk cartons, jam jars or lunch boxes.
At the same time, the exhibition of local native Dagmar Lasotová started in the Ostrava gallery. Called Things I See, it runs until January 5 next year and features her graphics, drawings and collages from the late 1970s to the present day.
In them, Lasotová works with lines, text and pressed plants. Also on display are her drawings on a grid of verticals, horizontals and diagonals called Osmisměrky, which resemble needlework, or a cycle called Nálepky po tchánovu. Most of the collages and drawings come from the collection of the Gallery of Fine Arts in Ostrava, some were lent by the author from her studio. The latest work, in which she also used her own sheets with stickers from old match boxes, was created by Lasotová this year.
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