Forbidden Fruit in Nová Galerie – Slovak female painters provoke with their works balancing on the brink of pornography

05.06.2015 12:03

Press Release: Forbidden Fruit in Nová Galerie – Slovak female painters provoke with their works balancing on the brink of pornography

 

Bears, Catastrophes and Other Everyday Events
Katarina Janečková Walshe & ​ Svetlana Fialová

  • Nová Galerie
  • 18. 6. – 25. 7. 2015
  • Opening: June 18th, 2015 at 7 p.m.

 

Prague, 10. 6. 2015 – Nová Galerie in Vinohrady has prepared a joint exhibition of two young and talented female painters, who both come from Slovakia and who set out for the world. Katarina, a painter and world wakeboarding champion, lives alternately in New York and Texas and invited her colleague artist Svetlana, who won the prestigious British Jerwood Drawing Prize,  to join her for their first unique exhibition in Prague.

Painter Katarína Janečková-Walshe comes from Bratislava. She is also a sportswoman - a world wakeboarding champion – and she lives alternately in New York and Texas. She graduated from the   Josef Vydra School of Applied Arts in Bratislava and continued her studies at the Bratislava Academy of Fine Arts in prof. Ivan Csudaia’s studio.

Katarina’s painting style is fresh, distinctive and joyful and her paintings emanate happiness, playfulness, passion and eroticism. Her works are balancing on the brink of pornographic kitsch, they are instinct with eroticism and they let the viewer taste the “forbidden fruit”. Katarina is an inquisitive woman and artist; she provokes and has her own specific visual world with a personal iconography often on the brink of playing with pornographic sexual nudes of young girls interacting with distinctly anthropomorphized teddy bears. Katarina plays a lot – she plays with colours, composition, topics and even the spectators; she creates a world which is exciting to look into and be inspired by it.

Světlana Fialová comes from Košice, where she attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Rudolf Sikora’s studio and later, she graduated from the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, Vladimír Skrepl’s studio. She currently lives and works in London and Košice alternately. Individual exhibitions of her works were held in Paris, Budapest and Vienna; she also won the Jerwood Drawing Prize (2013), which is the most prestigious award for drawing in Great Britain. Fialová almost exclusively works with ink on large formats. Her drawing is clear, clean and an almost obsessive desire to cover the white surface is characteristic for it – Svetlana tattoos a large sheet of white paper, she fills it with her own iconography, but does not hesitate to combine her characteristic personal symbols (e.g. the portrait of her boyfriend pulling chewing gum from his mouth) with symbols from the realm of Christian iconography (e.g. Dürer’s Horsemen of the Apocalypse). Fialová recycles and remixes the existing visual code and transforms it into a new one, which, in her opinion, gives accurate and updated answers to the meaning and state of the contemporary world.

 

Bears, Catastrophes and Other Everyday Events

Katarina Janečková Walshe and Svetlana Fialová

 

  • Nová Galerie
  • 18. 6. – 25. 7. 2015
  • Opening: June 18th, 2015 at 7 p.m.

 

Nová Galerie
Balbínova 26
Praha - Vinohrady
Opening hours: Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday 14:00 – 19:00, Saturday 11:00 – 15:00

www.novagalerie.cz

 

Further Information:
Nina Hedwic
gallerist
+420 608 231 209
info@novagalerie.cz

 

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