King Is Dead - Kirstine Roepstorff & Matyas Chochola
07 / 06 / 2019 - 22 / 09 / 2019
Cermak Eisenkraft, Pop Up Gallery Smetanovo nabrezi 4.
Authors: Kirstine Roepstorff, Matyáš Chochola, Tomáš Zapletal
Texts for the exhibition: Kristian Vistrup Madsen, Kirstine Roepstorff, Matyáš Chochola, Renata Leroy Vávrová, Tomáš Zapletal
The patronage of the exhibition was taken over by J. E. Ole Frijs-Madsen, the Ambassador of Denmark in the Czech Republic.
The exhibition is held with the financial support of the Danish Arts Foundation.
The gallery Cermak-Eisenkraft presents its already tenth original exposition named King is Dead / Král je mrtev, introducing the creations of Danish visual artist Kirstine Roepstorff and Czech visual artist Matyáš Chochola. The event takes place in the premises of Cermak Eisenkraft POP-UP Gallery in the SmetanaQ house.
The Danish representative in the Venice Biennale and the laureate of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award meet to present both their recent and older works, paintings, collages, statues and installations that create a symbolical, in shades of darkness rendered landscape that is allegorically produced to narrate mythical stories and to evoke a contemplative, at the same time magnificently spiritual and powerful mood.
The works of both authors are connected by their experimental philosophical interpretations of human existence. They represent the basic pillars of cultural and spiritual essence of the mind that are stored in our subconscious, defining and predetermining our ability to grasp the situation and orientate ourselves in the environment. The works on display evoke their own archetypes that should be comprehensible to the viewer even in the absence of a particular cultural association.
The name of the exhibition itself is, exactly as in Shakespeare plays, a reference to the concept of historical truth that is subject to interpretation and changes with time.
The basis of Kirstine Roepstorff’s art is the awareness of balance in all of its diversity of meanings – from the failures of power structures (both today’s and historical) up to the human condition and its principles of balance in both body and mind. Her works are often a composition of horizontal lines whose distribution reflects various layers of consciousness. The artist uses aesthetics with an omnipresent feeling and corporeal determination as a doorway to more delicate and immaterial aspects of everything that physically and spiritually affects us. Kirstine Roepstorff is acclaimed for her collages with juxtapositions of fragments and materials such as cloth, brass, wood and paper, focusing on the gaps between them and on the proposition of prospective possibilities. Her artistic style generally pursues the exploration of gaps and mutual relations and is determined by darkness that is a temporary and regenerative power and the genesis of art, lives and visions. In recent years, the work of Kirstine Roepstorff incorporates even objects and sculptural elements made mostly of concrete and brass.
The typical statues and installations of Matyáš Chochola are abstract, mostly three-dimensional objects that combine a range of unusual materials with everyday items. Together they create a harmonious chaos. Trash aesthetics is combined with precise glassmaker techniques, uniting the present day symbolic poetry with its ancient roots. Chochola experiments with the postinternet art, the nontraditional yet elaborate combination of shamanism and pop culture of the 1990s. His intermedia art is occasionally accompanied by additional elements – video or performance.
Chochola repeatedly evaluates postmodern experience, confronts archaic and pop-cultural content and refers us to both totemism and corporate culture. His works are focused on observation of outlines of collective memory that never fully identified with the ideals of the enlightened absolutism, sustaining itself using older cultural layers. What Matyáš Chochola finds important is freedom, energy and overstepping the usual limits.
Entry to SmetanaQ is free throughout the duration of the exhibition.
This exhibition follows the ongoing Kirstine Roepstorff exhibition at Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich, Switzerland.
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