THE SEA
NEVAN CONTEMPO / PRAHA (Czech Republic)
21.11.2015 – 19.12.2015

The young yet already distinctive Slovak painter Lucia Tallová exhibits her latest work at the Nevan Contempo Gallery in Prague. A series of objects and watercolours entitled The Sea offers mature outlooks, the seeds of which were planted during her residency in California (2014, the Topoľčany Platform 1- 12 initiative). Here her passionate collector’s eye, that has long formed and directed her creative development, was caught by a new motif of historical postcards and photographs featuring the local coastal scenery. From the start small formats using different experimental techniques run in parallel to Tallová’s grandiose acrylic paintings. After traditionally framed watercolours and collages featuring the central motif of wedding couples from historical photographs, and after an interlude of lightboxes and watercolour graphics, the artist has now come up with a completely new visual theme, as well as a new method of modifying appropriated and manipulated postcards and photographs. Her “collection items”, dramatically marked by artistic intervention, she encloses within the frame as within a showcase and then incorporates (visually but not semantically) into multilevel and multi-perspective installations, in which she allows for the movement of the viewer – the shifts in their attitudes and point of view. Part of her “archive” featuring seascapes was seen by the Slovak public at her joint exhibition with the Italian artist Cristina Fiorenza at the Nitra Gallery (Devoid Places, 2015). The current Prague collection is primarily devoted to an eternal human and artistic fascination with the sea and its horizon, which is archetypally present though in reality there exists no line of the earth. Lucia Tallová creates her horizons with a black line, ribbon, stain, crumpled or perforated paper, typical black flow, or through the application of lace decor. She often turns the photographed landscape upside down and integrates it into the whole, creating a disturbingly strange element from the intimately known. The addition of painting allows her to move from the photograph to the essence – her seas then ebb and flow and the horizon becomes infinite. The series of aesthetically extraordinary objects are supplemented by watercolours being shown for the first time, with free abstraction and minimised landscapes untypical of the artist, and some surprises ...

Courtesy of the artist
Photocredit: Milan Vagač

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