6/1 — 12/2/2017
Nikol Kutíková has come up with a new architectural design for Galerie 35m2 containing three key elements in the form of a point, a visual line, and a three-dimensional shape. The point, to which all else relates, is on the top of a pyramid-shaped hill. The hill is oriented horizontally and is hung in an inaccessible room. The pyramid seems to pass through the wall, where its base has become stuck. The line determines the perspective form which this point can be observed, a point that is only visible from the outside through a portal even though it is partially hidden by the portal itself. The line of the viewer’s gaze is limited as much as it could possibly be. The three-dimensional shape – the architecture of the observation room – strictly divides the space into front and rear, inside and outside.
We recognize Kutíková’s visual language primarily thanks to her favorite symbols of the everyday. They become objects of a game in which there is plenty of room for purely formal, universal analogies as well as for indescribable personal experiences. Kutíková seeks out and imaginatively transforms common, regularly accessible materials such as mass-produced furniture, construction materials, garden fencing, prefabricated patterns, paints, and wall or floor covering. She then uses these industrial ingredients to create various environments or to inhabit a chosen space. Her objects and installations possess a dramatic quality; they are forms of concreteness, temporary homes for impersonal prefab objects characterized by a simplicity of objects and materials, a simplicity that is at once attractive and repulsive.
Important elements in the work of Nikol Kutíková are intuition, mystery, and a silent restraint that keeps her from needlessly verbalizing her work, from ideologically addressing or codifying it into more objective contexts. As both a painter and a sculptor, she consciously gives up many of the things that we might at first glance associate with such hand-crafted beauty (…without any intention of attacking the world of art; it’s far too late for that…). She is capable of focusing on a different beauty and a different absoluteness, which in her case means asking herself where she is, whether she wants to be somewhere, and under what circumstances. The place or space that she considers is not random but entirely finite and strictly organized. It is determined by symbolic, emotionally bound, and mutually conditioned concepts. It has its front and rear.
curated by Michal Pěchouček
